Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by xyzzy4747 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

xyzzy4747

Not trying to offend anyone here but I think shell scripts are the wrong solution for anything over ~50 lines of code.

Use a better programming language. Go, Typescript, Rust, Python, and even Perl come to mind.

View on HN

> shell scripts are the wrong solution for anything over ~50 lines of code.

I don't think LOC is the correct criterion.

I do solve many problems with bash and I enjoy the simplicity of shell coding. I even have long bash scripts. But I do agree that shell scripting is the right solution only if

    = you can solve the problem quickly 
    = you don't need data structures
    = you don't need math 
    = you don't need concurrency

In my opinion, shell scripting is the right tool when you need to do a lot of calling programs, piping, and redirecting. Such programs end up being cumbersome in "proper" languages.

If there are already software written to do the stuff and I'm just coordinating them (no other computation other than string manipulation) I'd take bash every day. I would only reach to python if I need to do stuff like manipulating complex data structures or something with heavy logic.

"you can do anything not matter how horrible you feel"

but yea, shell is foremost a composition language/environment

~1k lines of bash with recutils for data persistency and dc for simple math. Was not quick to solve for me, custom invoices .fodt to .pdf to email, but I got it done. Shell is the only other scripting language I am familiar with other than Ruby. And I am worse at Ruby.

Sometimes options are limited to what you know already.

I enjoy the simplicity of shell coding

You mean, the complexity of shell coding? Any operation that in a regular language is like foo.method(arg) in shell expands into something like ${foo#/&$arg#%} or `tool1 \`tool2 "${foo}"\` bar | xargs -0 baz`.

> in a regular language [...] like foo.method(arg)

Note what you just said: when you want an object with a method that takes a parameter, you find bash too complex.

You gave an example that is not appropriate for bash.

However, bash does have functions. So if you don't need an entire underlying object system just to run your logic, you could have

    function foomethod () { 
        parm1=$1
        #more logic   
    }

My comment was more about basic string/number ops implemented as cryptic incantations, not functions per se. I regularly write bash. Simple things like trimming, deleting suffix, removing quotes, taking a substring, etc always look like someone is cursing in the code. I can’t remember this afterthought gibberish no matter how many times I write it, so I have to maintain few pages of bash snippets in my obtf.

Be damned the day I decided to write a set of scripts in it rather than looking for a way to make typescript my daily driver, like it is now. Bash “code” “base” is one of the worst programming jokes.

Exactly, plus there's no compiler or type safety.

some data structures, math, and some concurrency are just fine in shell scripts. bash has arrays so you can do pretty elaborate data structures. where it falls down is being bug-prone. but some code is useful even if it's buggy

Try running a 6 month old Python project that you haven't run in that time and report back.

Meanwhile, 10 year old Bash scripts I've written still run unmodified.

Winner by a mile (from a software-longevity and low-maintenance perspective at least): Bash

That’s a testament to your distribution/package manager’s stability, not to the language itself. I happen to write my scripts in Elixir (which is as fast-moving as Python 3), using a pinned version of it in a Nix flake at the root of my `~/bin` directory. Scripts from 5 years ago are still as reproducible as today’s.

Isn't compare a Python project to a Bash script an unfair comparison?

Compare a Python script to a Bash script. If your Python3 script (assuming no dependencies) doesn't work after 6 months I got some questions for you.

(And I don't really get how a 6 month old Python _project_ is likely to fail. I guess I'm just good at managing my dependencies?)

Unless you have pinned the exact version numbers in requirements.txt (which you should) or kept you conda/venv..etc around it might be hard. I know at this stage this would be too much compared to what we are talking about regarding python scripts but non-python dependencies are real painful.

I know that this is probably beyond bash scripting vs python scripting but I was just replying to how 6 months project can have problems.

Also not a 6 months scale but the python standard library definitely changes and I would take bash anytime if I have to use venv for running util scripts.

Edit: When python3.8 removed 'time.clock()' it was annoying to change that. I know that it was deprecated since 3.3 (as I remember) but this is the example I have in mind now. But probably it was before I was born that people using

start=$(date +%s%N)

end=$(date +%s%N)

And I will be dead before/if this becomes impossible to use.

Some of us enjoy the masochism, thank you very much.

Hear, hear! Bash me datty.

Deno is great for writing quick scripts: https://deno.com/learn/scripts-clis

Bun has similar features: https://bun.sh/docs/runtime/shell

I draw the line after a single if.

I agree with the general idea, but 1) LOC is not a good metric 2) I would immediately take off the list Python and Typescript, and anything what is compiled, leaving the list much shorter

TypeScript is good for this kind of a thing if you're only running it on your own machines and don't have to mess around with environments all the time. You can also run it with ts-node.

I draw the line at around 300 lines.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com