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Comment by zer | Hacker News Reader

Fish is really great for an interactive shell, I love using it. Not so great when it comes to scripting though. For example I think there's still no way to easily exit a script on error except to manually check exit codes.

However I haven't tried writing scripts in zsh yet, just sh/bash.

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I couldn't possibly use a shell that wasn't also a decent shell script. It seems my natural progression is always:

1. "Hand written" commands in shell

2. Shell script with copy-pasted commands from interactive session

2b. Evolved shell script with getopt. Complexity level beginning to tickle the spidey sense that it's too big.

3. Node.js script (I can write Python but JS seems infinitely nicer)

fish would break the 1->2 transition, sending me straight to 3 before I've really gotten a handle on the problem domain.

Perhaps it's just personal preference, but in what world is JS "infinitely nicer" than python?

Sorry, I didn't mean to start a flame war. I find regexes, HOF, and especially asyncio/Promises much more palatable in JS, which are things I look forward to when moving out of shell scripting land.

I'm really far from a JS fanboy, but Python's whitespace thing really is annoying enough that I avoid it when possible.

Ruby'd be my pick for "most-pleasant scripting language" so long as I can avoid any libraries/frameworks that do too much metaprograming "gee, wouldn't you love to never be able to track down where this is defined?" crap. Maybe Lua, but deps are a bit of a pain to manage there, and it's a huge step down in third party library availability compared with the other three languages here mentioned.

Really, if not for up-to-date library availability being higher in other languages, I'd probably still be using Perl for everything. It feels more "command-line native" than the other options. Installed everywhere. The community's not too in-love with trendy, cute bullcrap. A project you wrote five years ago will probably still run fine with no effort. It's kinda like supercharged bash with way fewer footguns.

I've been seeing a lot of pro-perl comments here on HN. Never used it myself, may have to check it out.

Beware that it was created at a time when many programs were written in plain text editors, with no syntax highlighting or autocompletion, with the printed-book language manual on your desk, on a screen that could legibly display only a small fraction of the text that a modern display can (or even ones that came along a few years later). Hence: sigils for variables (though unlike PHP these make some sense and are actually used to do things, and aren't just there because... well, because Perl did it, so PHP should too, I guess); single-character magical variables for very commonly-used loop- or input-related variables; et c.

I don't think anyone would make something quite like it these days, starting form scratch.

Nothing precludes you from using bash scripts even if ysit fish interactively. Just set a shebang in the script, or run it with bash script.sh.

That said, personally, for anything more involved than a one-liner alias kind of script, I turn to python, or PowerShell on Windows.

> That said, personally, for anything more involved than a one-liner alias kind of script, I turn to python, or PowerShell on Windows

You and submitter (who according to CV is proficient in Python) might like Oilshell.

> for anything more involved than a one-liner alias kind of script, I turn to python

I agree with this. If you can trust your users to have python3 in their environment, I don't see a good reason to use sh/bash instead of python. Non-trivial shell scripts are unreadable to me, and the semantics are too different from normal programming languages.

The only scenario I can see is a script that has to call multiple commands over and over, which can be a pain in python if you're piping a lot of stuff and all that. No, piping grep to cut and sed doesn't count; you can do that in python itself.

> If you can trust your users to have python3 in their environment, I don't see a good reason to use sh/bash instead of python

You would need to ensure said users have all the pip dependencies your python script imports as well. shell scripts don’t have that issue unless you’re calling some external program that isn’t installed.

>shell scripts don’t have that issue unless you’re calling some external program that isn’t installed.

Good thing that bash has such an extensive amount of standard libraries and that you're almost never calling external programs? And unlike Python, which is seemingly almost exclusively calling third-party libraries from PyPI?

I made dash my sh and started writing shell scripts targeting it instead of bash. If there's some bash-ism that can't be elegantly expressed in POSIX sh, it's time to bring out something like Python.

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