alt Hacker News> It is a terrible language
It's not. It only becomes terrible when you misuse for it's original purpose.
Microsoft Excel isn't terrible, but the way it gets used makes it terrible.
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No, it is terrible. The entire reason things like Fish annd PowerShell exist is because bash (and POSIX sh language broadly) are garbage even for their original purpose. Maybe it had to be that way because we didn’t know any better or needed to preserve historical semantics. But that doesn’t make it good.
Word splitting. Pipefail. Quoting hell. Scoping. On-error-resume-next by default. Returning values implemented like errno. Perlish cryptic tenseness around basic string manipulation/arrays. Magic global variables that don’t behave like other variables. Argument unpacking and shift.
These are bad language features, and people trip over them constantly. Even when they’re only using bash as an interactive shell or a <10 line snippet runner.
I love bash. I write a lot of bash too. It is a extremely powerful and useful language. But that also doesn't mean it is a good language.
There are many non-intuitive things, hence that pitfalls page I linked. You can't just deflect and say that the user is "holding it wrong". If it is difficult and unintuitive in how to "hold" it correctly, that's a design problem, not a user problem.
Despite bash being a terrible language, I still use it on a daily basis because it is useful. But don't conflate these things.