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Hush, a modern shell scripting language

hush-shell.github.io

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Re: Hush, a modern shell scripting language

#51

Post by nine_k »

First, this is a pretty nice language, which achieves much with very few, very general constructs. It's distinctly higher level than Bash, while using much fewer concepts. Here I applause.

Its shell capabilities are also minimalist, but should be ergonomic enough to avoid nearly all of the ceremony that Python's `popen()` usually requires.

OTOH I'm certain that prefixing all standard functions with `std` will get tiresome soon; I'd go with prefixing them with a `@` or `:` or another short special-case glyph. Also, the fact that `1 != 1.0` scratches me the wrong way; I'd rather have an integer be equal to a float when the float's fractional part is exactly zero. It does make mathematical sense, and is cheap to implement.

In general, Hush looks like a great language for cases when writing Bash becomes tiresome, and you'd rather reach for Python, Ruby, or Perl, but know that each incurs its own pain when used as a shell language.

Hush would also make a very nice embeddable language, much like Lua on which it is based.

Re: Hush, a modern shell scripting language

#52

Post by nine_k »

JNRowe wrote: post #14

The language looks really quite interesting. I could see myself using it for quick scripts. I think I'd prefer bash's noclobber behaviour to be the default redirection style. The explicitness of being forced to >| always feels like a nice safety feature to me, which would tie in nicely with their other defaults for safer scripting. Also, not sure I'm keen on their minor change to the redirection syntax¹. It suggests…

Frankly, I think that only, say, three things are worth keeping from traditional shells: pipes, redirections, and $-variables.

Most of the rest in them are design choices dictated by highly constrained machine resources and, most of all, incremental evolution. I'd say that Bash as a language is larger than Hush, while being conceptually much less clean, and in many regards less ergonomic.

Re: Hush, a modern shell scripting language

#53

Post by sverhagen »

dahfizz wrote: post #13
chaorace wrote: post #4

Is this really a shell scriping language? Hush isn't an interactive shell, nor does it compile to a common shell script. The only way to run these scripts is to install the hush interpreter and run the script through it. Isn't that just a normal scripting language? What's the real benefit of using this over Node or Python? I suppose the syntax is more aesthetically similar to shell scripts... but I don't exactly see…

System level stuff sucks in Python. Dealing with files, I/O, permissions, etc is a real pain. It easily takes 5x as long and as many loc to do the same thing as in bash. I can see the benefit of dropping to a command block to, say, run a command and filter the output with some | grep | awk | sort of whatever, and then seamlessly come back up to a more fully featured language to deal with that data.

My experience is different. For me, Python has a good balance of readability, access to system functions and consistent, predictable interfaces. I'm not saying you're wrong, just that "it depends". I'm pretty adequate at writing BASH, but it's not my "daily driver" programming language, so I have to still try things out, google a lot of things that aren't easily obvious, and excessive trial and error. But as a Java programmer I also know that Java, with all of its abstractions and verbosity, is a complete non-starter for shell scripting. For me, Python has often been a helpful compromise.

Part of this may also be that I've never learned to do a great job at organizing a BASH shell "project". So, those often get unwieldy maintenance nightmares. At plenty of time me and my peers have agreed: when your BASH script exceeds [some low number of] lines, find another language.

Again, it matters a lot what your team's culture and comforts are. If that's BASH for you, then r.e.s.p.e.c.t.

Re: Hush, a modern shell scripting language

#54

Post by feanaro »

da39a3ee wrote: post #8
chaorace wrote: post #4

Is this really a shell scriping language? Hush isn't an interactive shell, nor does it compile to a common shell script. The only way to run these scripts is to install the hush interpreter and run the script through it. Isn't that just a normal scripting language? What's the real benefit of using this over Node or Python? I suppose the syntax is more aesthetically similar to shell scripts... but I don't exactly see…

The point is that you can do things like create external processes, pipe them together, redirect output to files, with the same ultra-lightweight syntax of bash etc. Compare that to all the nonsense you have to do in Node or Python to pipe two processes together!

This is a thing: https://pypi.org/project/plumbum/

Re: Hush, a modern shell scripting language

#56

Post by mypalmike »

feanaro wrote: post #54
da39a3ee wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that you can do things like create external processes, pipe them together, redirect output to files, with the same ultra-lightweight syntax of bash etc. Compare that to all the nonsense you have to do in Node or Python to pipe two processes together!

This is a thing: https://pypi.org/project/plumbum/

Wow that's clever. Scary and clever. I might try it out.

Re: Hush, a modern shell scripting language

#60

Post by geocar »

gorgoiler wrote: post #34
cjohnson318 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love Python, but if all I need to do is grab one part of one line of something, and put it into some other command, then I'm just going to use some unholy mixture of sed, awk, or whatever. If I did the same thing in Python, I'd end up with thirty lines or more.

Thirty lines? Unholy one liners are not limited to shell scripting: from subprocess import check_output sh = lambda script: check_output(script, shell=True, text=True) ips = set(line.split()[-1] for line in sh('last -a').splitlines() if line and 'tmux' not in line) The first two lines are pure overhead. The last line is the equivalent of a shell script one liner but now has all the advantages of a language that suppo…

> The first two lines are pure overhead.

In 200 bytes half of which is overhead. That's not a great start.

> The last line is the equivalent of a shell script one liner

It's slower and requires much much more typing, and anything I want to add isn't going to go in the right place. It has a gross hack to support "tmux", and produces other spurious output (bugs). I don't want my X sessions or other ptys; I have reverse DNS disabled, and I really just want IP addresses.

This is what I would write in shell:

    last -a|sed -e 's/.* \([0-9a-f]*[:.][0-9a-f.:]*\)$/\1/;t;d'|sort -u
> now has all the advantages of a language that supports “\N{clown face}”.

This is a joke right? I have twenty cores, this is going to use three. Python is going to use one. 30% less typing, less bugs, faster. Those things are important. A fucking emoji is not.

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