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Comment by bmacho | Hacker News Reader

I am still waiting for a language that has variables, strings, loops and if-branches, and can pipe programs together.

OIL and ABS are close but who uses those.

The weird thing is we were already there in the early 90's with perl, and as a community uniformly decided to walk away from it. Now we're "still waiting" for stuff people were running on SPARCstations?

I think all but the die hards got tired of the jokes. If only they had held on a little longer, those would have stopped when people forgot about modems and line-noise...

Check out Tcl! It's built around strings, with a command syntax similar to shell. The standard library "exec" command allows launching programs including pipes and redirects. Although it's a bit clunky (e.g. there's no way to quote a '|' or '>' argument)

https://www.tcl-lang.org/man/tcl/TclCmd/exec.htm

Is tcl still mainstream? And what's the dependency install like on a standard system?

I used tcl 15 years ago and it was pretty great, but the SDKs were already getting old and many falling unmaintained. I worried about the future of tcl

On Fedora, I think it might even come installed by default (possibly as a dependency of Python's Tkinter module). There's also Jim Tcl, an embeddable implementation with very few dependencies.

pwsh. Also hashmaps (and structured data generally) so you can do

`ls | where createtime < now - hour`

That's pseudocode, I don't use pwsh every day.

pwsh never really took off as it was good tech during bad leadership (Steve Ballmer), but I hope someone (maybe Rust coreutils people) steal the approach.

pwsh never took off because it doesn't fit the spirit of unix system administration. pwsh is object based while on unix systems, it's all about shredding text. If you are on windows, use powershell as it makes your life easier. But I don't think anyone wants to use powershell on unix, linux, etc.

“Shredding text” (is scraping) is brittle. Nearly all programmers know this. Especially people that have been using Unix for more than twenty years.

Regarding you last sentence: yes that’s why I mentioned it didn’t take off in the comment you replied to.

But long term scraping will die.

AFAIK, perl still comes by default with all Unixes that are actually used.

But well, most languages support piping program together. You will need a 5 to 10 lines wrapper on the most used ones, but it's always well supported.

And as a bonus, you get to explicitly say how the pipe should behave, instead of searching the docs to learn how to handle failure or early stream termination.

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