181–190 of 330 posts
I think this is a cool concept, and all, but honestly, at this point, why just not use Python3 as your project's scripting language, and reap all the benefits of a simple, typesafe/autocomplete ready language with broad IDE support, and no intermediate 'compile step' which generates "don't touch" code?
besides that? probably nothing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bash is ubiquitous and stable, making bash scripts incredibly portable. All of the other languages you bring up are great for authoring code, but have a non-zero amount of friction when running code in the wild. Python may be omnipresent, but you can rarely count on a specific version or the presence of specific libraries. Go requires compiling platform-specific binaries. Even JVM- or JS-based software requires insta…
I didn't realize we were going so far back. In that case, Perl may be more convenient than Python/Go, and almost certainly a better choice than bash. Still, > If you want to write some code (e.g., a launcher, installer, utility code, etc...) that is almost certainly going to run on any computing device created in the last several decades, bash is your language. Can you give an example of a "several decades" old devic…
Things like perl (without CPAN) and bash generally take backward compatibility more seriously than python does.
My experience with python (even ignoring the 2 to 3 debacle) is that you can run code on machines that were setup +/- six months from when the software was written. That's unacceptable for non-throwaway use cases unless your company is willing to burn engineering time needlessly churning software that's feature complete and otherwise stable.
Very interesting. Don’t think I’ve seen anything like this before. How would the speed on something like this be compared to PowerShell, for example? Is it faster because it’s compiled? Could I write a web server in it?
Amber code gets turned into bash code, and run by a bash interpreter. So at best Amber's performance will match Bash's performance.
I've seen people say bash is faster than PowerShell, but I don't have benchmarks to back it up. Even so, I wouldn't recommend using it for performance intensive tasks such as writing a web server.
The great advantage I see for Amber is being able to write scripts in a sane language (bash is not enjoyable to write), and have those scripts be able to run anywhere that Bash is installed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Just learn bash. There are many reasons why it is to be avoided. For me the deal breaker was that one time I spent 2h debugging a script only to find out there was an extra space character that made the whole thing break silently. I would be willing to learn a sane language, but bash isn't one. If you need to know of a million tiny gotchas to implement even the simplest task safely and portably, then there isn't an…
> I spent 2h debugging a script only to find out there was an extra space character that made the whole thing break silently. When I was learning C++, I lost 2 days because of an extra ";" in an if statement. However this does not mean C++ is an insane language. It means it has quirks. > I would be willing to learn a sane language, but bash isn't one I kindly, but strongly disagree. > If you need to know of a million…
Any sufficiently quirky technology is indistinguishable from insanity.
To my eye, this does not look good. I consider myself to be quite proficient in bash. I write a lot of bash professionally. I've written a compiler (transpiler?) for a strongly typed configuration language that outputs bash. There are three main problems I see here. (1) Pipelines, subshells, and external dependencies. The example on the website compiles a conditional `if age if [ $(echo ${__0_age} ' Pipelines and sub…
> Just learn bash. There are many reasons why it is to be avoided. For me the deal breaker was that one time I spent 2h debugging a script only to find out there was an extra space character that made the whole thing break silently. I would be willing to learn a sane language, but bash isn't one. If you need to know of a million tiny gotchas to implement even the simplest task safely and portably, then there isn't an…
This sounds like using `a = b` instead of `a=b`, something you learn in an introductory Bash tutorial. It's not a good argument to say "I didn't learn Bash and it cost me 2 hours, therefore I should continue to not learn Bash."
Impressive project. But I always feel that if you reach a certain complexity in your bash scripts, you should rather pivot to any other $lang. Bash scripts should be simple glue between programs (unix-principle).
> Bash scripts should be simple glue between programs If a script is literally just running a list of commands and occasionally piping the output from one to another, you may as well make it POSIX compliant (therefore a sh script) since you're not using any features of Bash anyway. > But I always feel that if you reach a certain complexity in your bash scripts, you should rather pivot to any other $lang. This is a co…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On a machine where you can't easily install and maintain a runtime but you can install bash and amber and bc and sed?
No, because you don't need to install Amber, and bc and sed are pretty much guaranteed to be installed already if bash is.