It is probably the closest we're gonna get to a universal language, until we get wasm deeper in the os' or something. It is kind of the javascript of operating systems, which is both good and bad.
It is also quite bad that we've got to vet bash installation scripts before running them, as you may be required to run them as root. IMO, this isn't a huge issue for me personally, as we already are doing this for a lot of stuff, homebrew, linux package managers etc. We generally run a lot of untrusted code on our machines.
> Dude. It's really not that hard a language. Is amateur shell script ugly? verbose? redundant? bug-riddled? Absolutely. But it works despite that, and has fewer dependencies than other solutions, so in practice, it's fine.
Bash, zsh whatever, depend heavily on what is installed on the os, and what type of flavor of base tools are provided. Need base64 in a certain way, don't forget that line wrapping is different between bsd and linux. (a pain in the butt to test too).
Need to download something, better hope you're not running on a busybox or something with curl, or only have wget installed, now you gotta build support for both.
A lot of scripts, especially installation scripts are a product of blood, sweat and tears, mostly tears tho. Each line can be interpreted in a multitude of ways, under different conditions and versions of bash, os and so on, and the script will have to be robust enough for that.
> That said, use whatever you know. Wanna use Python? Use it. Wanna use a compiled language? Do it. Just make something. The biggest difficulties you will have in producing a product will not be the language.
It may not be the biggest difficulty, but it certainly is something we should consider. We've chosen our values, and shell scripts doesn't align with those, I'd rather not fight my environment every step of our development journey.
I am not building a new product, I am maintaining and expanding a product, as such I am heavily biased towards getting as few support tickets as humanly possible, while building an awesome experience. We are also mostly software engineers, and not sysadmins, as such we prefer compiled binaries. We then choose to distribute them through curated and secure channels.
We get the benefit that we can actually test parts of our tools in isolation, benchmark them if necessary, and version our stuff in a nice concise way. If I want to run our onboarding installation, I can simply fetch our current list of binaries expected for developers and run it, because I know they don't depend on external tools from the environment. This is a lot of work, but in a large development organization, this means a lot.
> You don't have to avoid shell just because people on HN (who've probably never read the man page) keep repeating that it's terrible. With Shellcheck, almost anyone can write good scripts now. If you can write a concise, bug-free script that works, then do it.
Just to reiterate, I am not digging on shell scripts, and I don't necessarily think they're terrible, they have their time and place, and for us, it is customization and extensibility. We setup our tools such that they work awesome on the cli, and can be composed however, developers like, but that is up to them, and how they want to form their workflows.
We've seen that developers really struggle to maintain what was previously built (myself included), so now we've got a more homogeneous tech stack, which comes with its own trade offs, but whose values align more with our engineering culture.