Was "bish" intentional? http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bish
Show HN: Bish – Shell scripting with a modern feel
31–40 of 44 posts
Re: Show HN: Bish – Shell scripting with a modern feel
#32For a long time I couldn't figure out why moving from bash to Python felt like such a big leap, and it was quite frustrating (path manipulation is particularly difficult). Recently I discovered a post [1] which touches on this: > The whole point of short code is saving human bandwidth, which is the single thing in a computing environment that doesn't obey Moore's law and doesn't double once in 18 months. Now, which k…
The semantic value of that punctuation is primarily for readibility and comprehensibility, then, where human bandwidth is way more limited. Achieving this goal is much more critical than reducing keystrokes, IMO. "Code is for humans to read, execution is an afterthought" or whatever the famous quote is. This isn't simply included to achieve a "modern feel".
Re: Show HN: Bish – Shell scripting with a modern feel
#33Perl started with roughly the same goal. awk, sed, grep, etc. weren't quite powerful enough, C was too low-level, Perl mixed them all up with real programming language features, while still being very usable in one-liners. I don't think this improves on Perl. Being compiled to Bash might be interesting, if your deployment systems don't have Perl. It used to be unthinkable that any UNIX/Linux system wouldn't have Perl…
> because Ubuntu doesn't install bash by default, it uses ash (a small POSIX shell). So, bash has the exact same flaw as Perl for that use case.
Do you have a citation for this? I just checked my boxes and servers and they all have bash and are using it directly as the default shell. I never had to install bash myself on these machines.
Re: Show HN: Bish – Shell scripting with a modern feel
#34Perl started with roughly the same goal. awk, sed, grep, etc. weren't quite powerful enough, C was too low-level, Perl mixed them all up with real programming language features, while still being very usable in one-liners. I don't think this improves on Perl. Being compiled to Bash might be interesting, if your deployment systems don't have Perl. It used to be unthinkable that any UNIX/Linux system wouldn't have Perl…
> because Ubuntu doesn't install bash by default, it uses ash (a small POSIX shell). So, bash has the exact same flaw as Perl for that use case. Do you have a citation for this? I just checked my boxes and servers and they all have bash and are using it directly as the default shell. I never had to install bash myself on these machines.
Ubuntu uses dash as the system shell. The default login shell is still bash. While /bin/sh is symlinked to /bin/dash - you are probably using bash from your terminal, unless you changed it.
Actually I just checked by /bin/sh and it's pointed to /bin/bash on my laptop (14.10) but on my desktop it is /bin/dash (also 14.10). Now I have some investigating to do. I suspect I did something that changed that but I don't remember doing it.
Re: Show HN: Bish – Shell scripting with a modern feel
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
> because Ubuntu doesn't install bash by default, it uses ash (a small POSIX shell). So, bash has the exact same flaw as Perl for that use case. Do you have a citation for this? I just checked my boxes and servers and they all have bash and are using it directly as the default shell. I never had to install bash myself on these machines.
Ubuntu uses dash as the system shell. The default login shell is still bash. While /bin/sh is symlinked to /bin/dash - you are probably using bash from your terminal, unless you changed it. Actually I just checked by /bin/sh and it's pointed to /bin/bash on my laptop (14.10) but on my desktop it is /bin/dash (also 14.10). Now I have some investigating to do. I suspect I did something that changed that but I don't rem…
Oops, you're right. dash and not ash. Definitely not bash, by default, however. I had to rewrite our install script to be POSIX friendly when the switch was made a few years ago. Not entirely awful, I guess, as the Ubuntu folks provided a really nice guide for converting.
Re: Show HN: Bish – Shell scripting with a modern feel
#36Perl started with roughly the same goal. awk, sed, grep, etc. weren't quite powerful enough, C was too low-level, Perl mixed them all up with real programming language features, while still being very usable in one-liners. I don't think this improves on Perl. Being compiled to Bash might be interesting, if your deployment systems don't have Perl. It used to be unthinkable that any UNIX/Linux system wouldn't have Perl…
> because Ubuntu doesn't install bash by default, it uses ash (a small POSIX shell). So, bash has the exact same flaw as Perl for that use case. Do you have a citation for this? I just checked my boxes and servers and they all have bash and are using it directly as the default shell. I never had to install bash myself on these machines.
It's actually dash. Sorry. Misremembered.
Re: Show HN: Bish – Shell scripting with a modern feel
#37As someone, who just recently started writing some small bash scripts, I wonder, why they did not create a universal comparator syntax and letting null, not-existing etc. evaluate to false, on top of the existing syntax. I get that it evolved, but since I did not evolve with it, I get frustrated by constantly tripping up on if-syntax, something you normally do not have to worry about when moving to other languages.
Bash hurts my ego.
Re: Show HN: Bish – Shell scripting with a modern feel
#38For a long time I couldn't figure out why moving from bash to Python felt like such a big leap, and it was quite frustrating (path manipulation is particularly difficult). Recently I discovered a post [1] which touches on this: > The whole point of short code is saving human bandwidth, which is the single thing in a computing environment that doesn't obey Moore's law and doesn't double once in 18 months. Now, which k…
Check out Batsh (which "compiles" to Bash *.bat):
Editor: http://batsh.org/
Source: https://github.com/BYVoid/Batsh/
Re: Show HN: Bish – Shell scripting with a modern feel
#39For a long time I couldn't figure out why moving from bash to Python felt like such a big leap, and it was quite frustrating (path manipulation is particularly difficult). Recently I discovered a post [1] which touches on this: > The whole point of short code is saving human bandwidth, which is the single thing in a computing environment that doesn't obey Moore's law and doesn't double once in 18 months. Now, which k…
I tend to write shell scripts in Ruby even more often than bash. I'm proficient in both, but I find that the larger the script, the more I'm affected by the lack of language support in bash, and the many oddities such as the many problems with quoting and string splitting and the hacks/special mechanisms needed to work around them. Even though bash has some "modern" features, they're typically a bit weird and hard to…
Bash sucks when it comes to arrays. Last week I had to change the 'input field separator' because bash arrays are kinda-sorta-but-not-really space delimited, which causes problems where elements have whitespace. I then had to revert the IFS immediately after the required operation, as that screwed something else up later in the script.
I like bash scripting, but the moment to use another language for a script for me is "will this require an array?"
Re: Show HN: Bish – Shell scripting with a modern feel
#40Hell and Shelly are based on a similar concept, but also try to use the power of the Haskell type system to prevent common errors and bugs.