alt Hacker NewsAwful old Bash. I hate it.
Seriously I don't know why you'd do this in Bash. Crazy choice.
Replies
It probably started as a helper script and grew from there. The script seems quite focused and doesn't grow, so a rewrite might not be warranted.
It also has no other dependency, which is also good. I have written helper script to run coding agents in a container. And you guessed it, it's in bash. For the reasons I just wrote down. Should it have to grow I would rewrite it, but not currently.
Known system dependency that's (almost) always on the system you're on.
I remember somebody once telling me that they had learned vi because "it was always installed". Well, no, technically, the only editor you can be sure is there is ed. So, you know, learn that. I was surprised that they actually did.
Bash is syntactically not perfect, I agree. However it's a well known, mature, stable environment. LLMs can write it well if you need them to. If it was perfect, we'd never have had Perl, and as a result we'd never have had Ruby, Python and other scripting languages.
But I like it's a tool that doesn't require me to go reach for a package manager and some build tools I don't always have on every system.
Really? I think there's a nice niche for tools like nb that Just Work. Ubiquity is a feature!
Some people like to claim that using a pretty esoteric language with lots of weird footguns, lack of basic features and data types, and spawning subprocesses for everything, is somehow keeping it simple.
I do not understand them.