Viewing profile — garethrowlands

It's really not that simple. Yaml can be more token efficient but not necessarily. And it's often not the biggest factor.

I totally agree with you. > the goodness of language for long code is inversely proportional to how nice it is for shell one-liners Well, except for this bit. Oil or fish and awk a…

Yeah, I don't see pwsh finding a place in the ecosystem. Even oil or fish struggle. Their place was mostly taken by python (which is a huge dependency but not another huge dependen…

I like your 2026 perspective. Objectively, the posix shell syntax is genuinely bad, even though the overall system that it enabled is amazing. It's a very old system that took off …

The trinary is semantically just an if expression though. Perl inherits C's problem that `if` can't be used in an expression context: my $x = if ($cond) { 1 } else { 2 }; # Syntax …

Absolutely! Your company likely started using bash before python was ubiquitous.

I still think that learning the shell environment makes a lot of sense these days. But mainly for interactive use. It's amazing the scripts your LLM can make you with, say, fd and …

Heh, I like that. We are indeed stuck with posix shell syntax; I didn't claim we weren't.

There are plenty of alternative shells that don't suffer these problems. Posix syntax didn't win because it was better - it's the classic 'worse is better'. > Old doesn't imply arc…

Sorry, the backticks were merely meant to delimit the code.

Some models are better than others. But it's all fixable with a relatively small skill. Try PowerShell Windows Skill perhaps.

$ Hey, claude, I've figured out the powershell one-liner we need and I've pasted it below. Please insert it into the application. ... I have analysed your idiomatic one-liner and p…

I have some absolutely amazing bash scripts that I would never have contemplated making myself in bash. And they'd only have been somewhat better in python. Claude for the win!

> System shell, however, isn't meant for writing entire applications. Programmable shells are, in fact, for programming. That posix shell syntax makes it impractical for meaningful…

The only upside of weird bash tricks is there's so much bash out there that the LLMs are really well trained on it - so you won't have to read the script, just the tests.

Articles like this are fun but they all come from posix shell syntax being fundamentally bad for scripting/programming. All the piping stuff is great, of course. And the overall ec…

The number one hard working concept in Haskell is parameterisation. A typical Haskell concept is just a concept, not a Haskell concept.

That map doesn't seem to include the trees in actual parks. Somewhere like Hampstead Heath or Richmond Park has actual woods.

That's awesome. Though, it doesn't seem to think Hampstead Heath has any trees. Nor Croydon, not even Thornton Heath. The Wilderness in Richmond Park seems to be a missing spot, as…

Citation needed.

STM isn't really used in Go like it is in Haskell. Here's the example from a Go STM package that's based on Haskell STM. It has gotchas that you won't encounter in Haskell though, …

It's very good. And quite short!

XSLT's matching rules allow a 'push' style of transform that's really neat. But you can actually do that with any programming language such as Javascript.

I used to use XSLT a lot, though it was a while ago. You can use Javascript to get the same effect and, indeed, write your transforms in much the same style as XSLT. Javascript has…

The term 'variable' is from mathematics. As others have said, the values of variables do vary but they do not mutate.