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Comment by shortrounddev2 | Hacker News Reader

Is it not an indictment of bash that, in order to make shells useful to modern data formats, we have to create tools with their own scripting languages and pipes? Since bash can't operate on structured data like jq does, jq has to have pipes inside jq expressions.

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> 1. Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new "features".

> 2. Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don't clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don't insist on interactive input.

> 3. Design and build software, even operating systems, to be tried early, ideally within weeks. Don't hesitate to throw away the clumsy parts and rebuild them.

> 4. Use tools in preference to unskilled help to lighten a programming task, even if you have to detour to build the tools and expect to throw some of them out after you've finished using them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy

(No, it is not an indictment of bash. This is how tools are supposed to work together.)

Then the Unix shells should be super dumb. Except that wouldn't be very useful.

That's how I'd like it to be. These are domain specific languages, so their own scripting is where I'd see them belong. Command line should stay true to its name: place where you enter your commands (and of course, other things that you can't delegate elsewhere, like variables and control structures).

yeah but JSON has become to de-facto universal format. At the very least, it would be cool if you could convert that into a common runtime format and pipe structured data from one command to another so you don't have to keep parsing things at every stage, or abandoning the shell entirely and working only in jq

Yeah, but water is also wet.

Shell scripting is beyond salvation. Inconsistent, illogical crap. It's ridiculous that Bash doesn't have first-class JSON support in 2023, but even if it did, that still wouldn't make me want to write Shell.

I could see a shell that doesn't suck for scripting that has first-class JSON support. Something like PowerShell, but not PowerShell, and close enough to bash that one could quickly get used to it.

Let's call it Javascript!

or node. being able to run external programs is the key here.

Sounds like Elk. https://elk.strct.net

ksh93 has "compound variables" that let you have arbitrarily deep trees of data. The syntax for that is ugly. It's hard to use. And I've never had luck with not causing ksh93 to crash when trying to use compound variables.

I think it'd be very nice to have a bash-like shell with a) jq-like JSON values in the shell (really, parsed, jv-like[0]), b) syntax for using jq programs in ${...}, something like ${var@jq:.jq.program.here}.

As for jq having pipes, they're a rather different beast, but I take your point.

[0] `jv` is the internal representation of JSON values in jq.

If you haven't come across it yet you might like nushell.

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