Ask HN: What to use instead of Bash / Sh for scripting?

It still has other python-style problems, like epic dependency graphs, with all the compatibility and bitrot nightmares those imply.

Also, for scripting stuff, my (readable, extensible) perl is about 10% as long as other people’s python, so 500 lines of perl ends up being 5000 lines of python. That creates a huge difference in maintainability and correctness.

With code golf, my perl can be 10x shorter than that, but then it is neither readable nor extensible, and doesn’t scale to 500 (or even 50) lines before becoming more trouble than it’s worth.

1) There aren't two disjoint versions to juggle

2) Dependency installation is clean and contained

3) Dependencies can easily be installed locally or globally, depending on your preference for isolation vs reuse

4) Lots of packages are available for doing cross-platform (read: Windows compatible) operations

5) JS makes it really easy to do efficient async tasks, for example high-IO scripting involving reading and writing lots of files and making network requests (without any dependencies, I might add)

At my last company I converted all our shell scripts to Node scripts when the pandemic hit, so they'd work predictably on Windows machines, and it was great. These days I'd do it that way to begin with.

I am familiar with and use quite a bit of js on the front end, but how is node for shelling out? This is something I find Python to be quite terrible at.

Calling shell commands is reasonably straightforward:

  const { exec} = require('child_process')
  const child = exec('ls', ['-lh', '/usr'])
  console.log('error', child.error)
  console.log('stdout ', child.stdout)
  console.log('stderr ', child.stderr)

I will admit though that in most of the cases where I've used it I didn't really do any shelling-out, so I can't speak much to how that experience scales in practice. Mostly I was either 1) doing self-contained logic with files, web requests, etc, or 2) delegating out to JS build tools (which even when they have a CLI, almost always expose a nice JS API too). Ymmv, etc.