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Comment by BadBadJellyBean | Hacker News Reader

This looks great. We have a lot of bash tools because it's the only stable interpreter that we have readily available on all our systems. But bash is a pain to write so this might actually make things easier.

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I had a small project that embedded the Lua interpreter in scripts as base64, which allowed me to write shell scripts in Lua, since it carried the interpreter with it. About 270k of bloat to make it work, though.

How many places do you have Bash, but not AWK?

Or Perl. Or Python. How many environments have only bash and not awk, perl, or python?

For small stuff I use bash / sed / awk / jq / yq / curl etc. I stopped using perl (a long time ago) and hate trying to build or distribute anything in Python. "You asked for a script! I give you... a venv, a pip install, woops need to compile something, so let's install build tools. Actually let's get github actions set up to handle this, or would you prefer a Docker image? Do you have a registry so I can share the image? Wait are you using a Mac? Multiarch image time! Or should I just give you a bag of scripts and a Dockerfile? Oh you're using Podman rootless, need you to read this page on how to access your own files as "you" in your container. Shit the wheels fell off! But look, Python is amazing and can do lots of stuff bash / curl / jq can't do!"

So these days I almost exclusively use Go wherever bash and friends aren't enough. Compile to Linux x86 & ARM and Darwin ARM, or just "go run" if it's simple enough.

I highly recommend UV If you find yourself forced to use python, UV is the way to go

Try it out :)

uv init uv add XXX uv run main.py

( You can pin python versions and auto install them etc )

You aren't really comparing apples to apples here. Anything you can do in bash/jq/curl you can do in python 3.x with only the stdlib. If you confine yourself to that, its still a better dev experience and can be run in any OS with a python package.

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