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Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

The better syntax used to be a selling point, but now with AI being able to generate any trivial one-liner and minor scripts you need on a day-to-day basics, have a bad syntax would only affect bigger projects, which I would not write in Fish shell anyway.

It's a hard sell.

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Generative AI might be able to generate them, but it's still on you to understand the result and check that it indeed does what you want. And with the sometimes very nuance- or foot-gun-rich syntax of bash, that's rather a significant burden, if you're not familiar enough with the syntax to write the script yourself in the first place.

Speak for yourself, but I would not want to be beholden to AI for every trivial shell one-liner. "Sorry boss, ChatGPT is down, I can't count how many *.txt files are in this directory. See you tomorrow!"

I'll take the better syntax, thanks.

Heaven forbid you read a man page. Even though Bash is weird, it's fully documented.

Documentation is useless if you don’t know what to look for. Which manual page do I open to find out what :(){:|:&};: means without already knowing?

To be fair, even local, small language models fare pretty well in such things (both explaining and writing).

Scripting languages are so dynamic, flexible, arcane, and subtle and the consequences for getting scripts wrong are so potentially catastrophic for a system that they are absolutely the last thing I would ever dare generate via LLM.

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