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Comment by Hendrikto | Hacker News Reader

Some people like to claim that using a pretty esoteric language with lots of weird footguns, lack of basic features and data types, and spawning subprocesses for everything, is somehow keeping it simple.

I do not understand them.

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Weird footguns don't matter if you stick to using shell for control flow, composition, and interpolation, and don't use all the weird things you have to look up every time. It's also very easy to do something in the commandline then just

  tail -n 8 $HISTFILE > script.sh

and very little to no editing is needed to make that useful. Shell is not a programming language, it's an interface to the OS, and thinking about it like a programming language is just asking for frustration.

> Shell is not a programming language, it's an interface to the OS, and thinking about it like a programming language is just asking for frustration.

I guess this just isn’t obvious to me. Where do you see the boundary between “interface to the os” and “programming language”?

Shell exists to give users a way to run programs. It was the user interface for UNIX, C was the programming interface. Yes, it's technically a programming language by any reasonable definition, but it's not meant to be used in the same way at all so that's not helpful.

I honestly think that's the contrary: it's the laziest choice possible when you want something to work immediately without thinking too much about it. Till like 7 years ago I made literally every script to do "personal" stuff in bash, because I wasn't quite good with any programming language and bash... was just there in my Linux machine, and I was already familiar with it because I was a long time Linux user. Sometimes you end up committing it on github and people start issuing feature requests, and at the beginning you are just happy that your work fits the need of other people and you don't want to rewrite it from scratch with a better programming language and end up over-scripting it. That's basically the story of a little program I made years ago. Now I don't log in on github anymore because I'm afraid people is still requesting new features...

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