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Comment by dawnbreez | Hacker News Reader

Bash users represent!

Seriously, Bash is fucking beautiful once you really dig into it. Pipes are unbelievably elegant.

Bash is great - we write almost 100% of dokku in it - but most bash looks like shit on a stick. Really hard to follow sometimes, and unless you are using modern bash, also really hard to ensure your own sanity.

I suspect that part of it is unusual syntax--if...fi, anyone?--and part of it is unusual syntax in non-bash things, i.e., Awk looks like moon runes, and to replace ; with \; in sed you need a grand total of SIX backslashes.

> if...fi, anyone?

And here I thought everyone wanted ALGOL-like syntax...

As someone who dabbled in C-like languages, it threw me for a little bit.

My comment was a joke based on contrasting two points:

1) "C-like" languages are often described as having "ALGOL-like" syntax. And indeed, C was based on languages significantly influenced by ALGOL-60 (though ALGOL-60 used BEGIN/END for blocks, not curly braces).

2) "IF/FI", "CASE/ESAC" and similar were in ALGOL-68, and Stephen Bourne drew them from there when he wrote the Bourne shell (with which bash was eventually intended to be compatible).

I spent a year maintaining 90k lines of bash. I've written some beautiful bash code and some horrendous bash code. Bash is a pretty poor programming language; it's an amazing user interface.

Elixir has pipes too. One of the great things about it.

I'll have to check it out, then.

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