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Byron's rc. https://github.com/rakitzis/rc

Sane quoting eliminates and a lack of recursive expansion make ssh a breeze.

Pattern matching, backquote status, and pipe status simplification are all incredibly easy to get right.

C-like syntax for blocks means nested hierarchies are easy to understand and to write correctly.

Simple small binary, doesn't require readline and can be built for almost every architecture and OS.

Wasn't aware of that one and it looks very promising, thank you. Does it work with `parallel`? Or does it have a similar built-in facility itself?

There is very little built in, but this is an advantage.

Yes GNU Parallel (that's what you're referring to I assume) can still run under rc, though I'm not sure exactly what makes you think it couldn't!

I am just being paranoid at this point, nothing else. :)

Thank you! Looks lightweight and less confusing. I'll give it a go.

You can definitely use Clojure using Babashka, https://github.com/babashka/babashka

Now that you mention OCaml, I have been using the OCaml dialect F# for scripting.

It works just like any script (.fsx files) and you can also compile it ahead of time.

There is a REPL for experimenting and the type system provides for a superior IDE experience.

It has the full .NET ecosystem at its disposal. And algebraic data types to ensure you cover all edge cases.

And last but not least - if you are scripting any kind of data wrangling, the Type Providers feature of F# offers a very powerful way to build those ETL jobs with type safety with just a few lines of code.

Agreed on all accounts but still -- how is the startup time?

For my most common uses cases - daily jobs to fetch data from remote APIs, clean, transform and combining data sets in a batch pipeline - the startup time has not been an issue.

Most steps are short scripts of a few hundred lines and compile quickly.

Downloading dependencies (libraries) may take a while depending on how much you pull in from e.g. NuGet (seconds not minutes) but you can keep these between runs.

For historical context, around 1994, I ditched shell with heavy awk and add use in favour of Perl to avoid the heavy overhead of multiple processes being spawned by the shell scripts.

So you have to know both what you need but also which alternatives you are benchmarking it against.

Yeah, I can accept the argument that usually startup time doesn't matter. But since I finally got fed up with shell scripting, I want to find a proper viable long-term alternative. I know that for most of my scripts I won't care neither for startup time nor for strong typing (just an example, I know that OCaml and thus F# have it) won't be necessary. But I just want to have a powerful tool in my hands for those few outlier cases where you'll get pissed off at slow startup.

But I can still agree with you!

> For historical context, around 1994, I ditched shell with heavy awk and add use in favour of Perl to avoid the heavy overhead of multiple processes being spawned by the shell scripts.

I feel a novice now. :D

To be fair, there weren't things I wasn't able to achieve with zsh scripts and `parallel` and the usual suspects (sed, awk et. al.) but when I measure how much time -- and sometimes sanity -- I lose until I make something rather trivial work, the analysis isn't in favour of my current workflow. 500 "quick and dirty" scripts each wasting you 3h as opposed to 5-10 minutes amounts to a LOT of wasted work time.

To be fair, I was not inclined to use F#. OCaml always impressed me with its amazingly fast compiler. But you have a very solid point that with F# you can use the entire .NET ecosystem...

> So you have to know both what you need but also which alternatives you are benchmarking it against.

I don't know exactly what I need, for the better or the worse. I just want to do one big switch (away from sh/bash/zsh scripting) and not have to redo it anytime soon, is all.

Most tasks are I/O bound anyway so normal shell scripting and `parallel` can take you VERY far. But I've been bitten by weak typing and surprisingly parsed values so I am looking for something stricter. Runtime speed is hardly relevant to anything because again, I/O bound is the norm (_especially_ when you work with the network; most network-bound tasks that people put in their scripts nowadays could easily be handled by a Pentium III from back in the day, I feel).

I don’t think you will find a silver bullet. If you switch away from shell and its set of trade-offs you will face another set of trade-offs with the next language.

The art is to select trade-offs that benefit the main line of work you want to do without causing too much trouble.

Personally my scripting preferences have changed over time depending on the types of problems I had to solve and what else I were doing at the same time. I have never found The One Solution but seen things slowly change back and forth over the years.

> I don’t think you will find a silver bullet. If you switch away from shell and its set of trade-offs you will face another set of trade-offs with the next language.

Sadly that's quite true.

So let me correct my statement: I am looking for "shell scripting on steroids" for when I intuit (or discover after 10 minutes of trying) that normal shell scripting won't cut it. I'll still use it but I want to have an extra tool in my belt for those cases when I need something a bit feature-rich but still quick to iterate on.

For now, looking through the sub-thread and brushing off on old knowledge and searching the net for an hour or so, my 3 top contestants are (in that priority order) -- OCaml, Ruby, the RC shell.

> I also know a guy who replaced Python with OCaml for quick scripting which is rather bizarre to me but knowing a bit more about OCaml nowadays, that actually can work just fine -- and OCaml is very terse.

> I would prioritize speed of startup and terse code over everything else.

If speed of startup and terse code are all you want... what's the problem with OCaml? It's got static typing too.

The only problem is that I'm a novice in it and it will take some significant investment of time and energy to learn it well. Which I still plan to do.

Was just wondering if there are replacements for shell scripting that are quicker to learn.

Ruby is fantastic for scripting. It has quite a few of the same conveniences that made Perl great for scripting and it's a lot easier (for me at least) to maintain and understand when seeing it months or years later.

Yes, yes yes. I started Ruby because I got a job at a Rails shop. I didn't like it all that much for a while, but then I decided to write a CLI program in Ruby and break out of rails.

I quickly realized nearly everything I didn't like about "ruby" was actually rails. After a couple of years I moved on and don't do rails anymore, but I ruby is still my go to for any script that requires arrays or maps (the point where bash begins to be really painful).

Ruby is the best scripting language ever IMHO*. Ruby one-liners (inherited from Perl tradition) make it plug nicely into a bash script also.

* I haven't tried Julia yet but plan to.

Yep, I agree. Only used it twice years ago for that and as another sibling comment mentions, it is pleasant to use.

How is the startup time though? That's important.

It's about the same as JavaScript:

  > time ruby hello.rb
  Hello, world!
  ruby hello.rb  0.11s user 0.13s system 81% cpu 0.297 total
  > time node hello.js
  Hello, world!
  node hello.js  0.10s user 0.16s system 84% cpu 0.307 total

Yeah, 100-200ms are quite fine in fact.

Maybe I got spoiled by Rust and OCaml that start in the matter of 3-8ms. :D But these Ruby and Node startup times are good.

What's wrong with bash? Specifically, what are you trying to do that you can't?

Wanted a `for` loop between two numbers, couldn't find a good way in 10 minutes, made the script require `zsh`.

Bash sequence expression didn't work? http://www.gnu.org/savannah-checkouts/gnu/bash/manual/bash.h...

Yep, didn't know about that one. Guess my Google-fu failed me back then.

wow, I was staring at it for a bit before I realized:

  for i in {1..10}; do echo $i; done

worked and was equivalent to:

  for((i=1;i<=10;i++)); do echo $i; done

  for i in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10; do echo $i; done

seq 5 10 | while read REPLY ...

for x in `seq 5 10`; do ...

I tried that but now I can't remember why I didn't end up using it. But yep, it works.

Ask how to do something, and you'll get nothing, but just tell the Internet something is hard, and you'll get loads of answers :)

for x in {5..10}; do ...

Something like `seq 5 10`?

Besides seq, this also works specifically in Bash:

  for ((i = 0; i < 10; i++)); do
      echo $i
  done

Perl, Julia, Python with PyPy, bash (but pretend it's something else)