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Modernish: a shell moderniser library

github.com

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Re: Modernish: a shell moderniser library

#2

Post by jph »

This is amazing for shells. Thank you for writing it.

Your reasoning and explanations are first rate, and the documentation is superb.

Your emphasis on POSIX is a great approach for working on a very wide variety of shells, including older ones and regulated ones. I deal with these regularly at enterprise clients, and I'm excited to try Modernish with these. Kudos!

Re: Modernish: a shell moderniser library

#3

Post by tibbetts »

Isn’t this going to make shell scripts that were already fragile on anything but bash not only fragile but also harder to debug? Combining the engineering ideas of JavaScript and autoconf with the checkered history of shell scripts seems like a case of -1 + -1 = -5.

Re: Modernish: a shell moderniser library

#4

Post by xiaq »

tibbetts wrote: post #3

Isn’t this going to make shell scripts that were already fragile on anything but bash not only fragile but also harder to debug? Combining the engineering ideas of JavaScript and autoconf with the checkered history of shell scripts seems like a case of -1 + -1 = -5.

It is more like polyfills that serve to defragment different shells and provide more modern constructs.

Re: Modernish: a shell moderniser library

#7

Post by chatmasta »

This looks really, really good. I’ve been looking for something like this for a while, even considered building it myself.

Javascript and Shell programs are actually pretty similar IMO. Both are loosely functional languages that can run in many different environments, with different feature sets in each. Both run from a single entry point. A lot of JS tooling could be applied to Shell scripting.

This library takes the right approach, by augmenting existing functionality with syntactical sugar for safer programming. The wrong approach is the many libraries attempting to make a “new” shell language, or a “superset” of shell. The beauty of shell programming is its portability, but that’s lost once you have even a single feature relying on non-POSIX functionality.

I like the Modernish approach because it’s just a library, but writing it can feel like writing a cleaner version of shell. The docs say Modernish was inspired by jquery, but I would argue it’s more akin to underscore or lodash in this sense.

Following the trend of shell/JS similarities, what I would like to see is a compiler and packaging system similar to webpack and npm. I’m not talking about a package manager that downloads libraries and binaries into some directory in $PATH, but rather a bundler that compiles all libraries imported from an entrypoint into a single executable shell script.

Re: Modernish: a shell moderniser library

#8

Post by sundarurfriend »

jph wrote: post #2

This is amazing for shells. Thank you for writing it. Your reasoning and explanations are first rate, and the documentation is superb. Your emphasis on POSIX is a great approach for working on a very wide variety of shells, including older ones and regulated ones. I deal with these regularly at enterprise clients, and I'm excited to try Modernish with these. Kudos!

Hey, it's good to know you found it so useful. Just to be clear though, I just found and posted this here; Martijn Dekker [1] seems to be the main contributor and presumably the creator of the library.

His email ID, according to a personal web page of his [2], is martijn at_the_rate_of inlv dot demon dot nl , in case you wish to send the kudos along his way.

[1] https://github.com/McDutchie

[2] http://www.inlv.demon.nl/martijn/index-old.html

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