Hacker News Reader

Comment by danielvaughn | Hacker News Reader

Oh god yes, LLM for bash scripting is fantastic. Bash is one of those languages that I simply don't want to learn. Reading it makes my eyes hurt.

View on HN

You could try zx[1]! I prefer it to Bash scripting.

[1] https://github.com/google/zx

You could, but then your script won't run anywhere except your own system, as opposed to running basically everywhere...

Bash is a terrible language in so so many ways and I concur that I have no interest in learning its new features going forward. I remember how painfully inadequate it was for actual computation and its data types are non existent. Gross.

You have to understand the domain in which its intended to be used.

Bash scripts are essentially automating what you could do at the command line with utility programs, pipes, redirects, filters, and conditionals.

If you're getting very far outside of that scope, bash is probably the wrong tool (though it can be bent to do just about anything if one is determined enough).

I don't know too much about the history, but wasn't this one of the original motivations for Python? Like it was meant to be basically "bash scripting but with better ergonomics", or something like that.

You might thinking of Perl. Affectionately known as the swiss army chainsaw of programming languages, it incorporated elements from bash, awk, sed, etc and smushed them together into a language that carried the early Web.

Sounds more like Perl. I do miss Perl. It was far nicer than Python as a bash replacement. Python is better for larger projects in my opinion, as Perl is too flexible and expressive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com