Hacker News Reader

Comment by guitarbill | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm not using my shell to the fullest, but 95% of commands are pretty simple, and not complicated queries. `ls` might have a bajillion flags, but `-lah` go a long way. Because fish's autocomplete, I don't have to remember tar flags. That's the killer feature for me.

Along those lines, a quick way to drive adoption could be a huge "how do i do x" or recipes page to Ctrl+F through. If I have to search the internet for how to do x in nushell/fish/etc, I might as well stick to arcane bash - at least you know someone has had the same problem before.

Make it easy for me to get stuff done by showing me how to get stuff done, and I'll grok the shell bit by bit.

I did see https://www.nushell.sh/cookbook/ , but it isn't really a searchable reference. There's some setup stuff, other short pages with basic tutorials (?), a link to a repo with example scripts, and for one-liners you are instructed to join a discord. None of these are easily searchable.

View on HN

> If I have to search the internet for how to do x in nushell/fish/etc, I might as well stick to arcane bash - at least you know someone has had the same problem before.

I feel the opposite way: if I don't really know Bash, I'm not throwing away a bunch of my hard-earned knowledge and experience to start again from zero by switching to Fish. It's just a lateral move, and an obvious win if the shell it takes me to is simpler, smaller, or otherwise easier to learn.

As long as you interact with others' software, the chances are, you will have to read bash in the future. So sure, you can learn fish, but you will likely have to learn some bash (or even sh) anyway. Might as well start from common option.

To be fair, that same argument could be made against any new programming language designed to replace an old, firmly entrenched one.

And it is, I use that argument regularly when people want to spin up a new project in a new language when the tooling doesn't support the new language and it's an uphill battle to make it work.

No, "lack of good tooling" is a completely different argument.

The argument put forth by the comment I replied to is that there is basically no point learning a new language, because to work with existing code you still have to know the old language.

Which I think is a massive fallacy. Yes, Kotlin programmers still have to understand Java to be effective. That doesn't make Kotlin useless.

Shell is pretty special though - it is a very frequent secondary language. In fact, even Kotlin itself uses bash:

https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin/blob/master/scripts/buil...

So sure, replace Java with Kotlin, C++ with Rust, Python with go/julia/ruby/whatever.. but bash or sh is here to stay. (And that would be bash or sh, not fish or nushell or something...)

Sure, and that's why Zig or D are not in the any of the top 10 lists.

You have to get a lot benefits to justify switching to a new default against the current critical mass.

(and this is especially true for shells: a large number of code is written in sh because it's assumed to be installed on all users' systems; so unless so many software starts requiring "fish" that it gets into default system install, we'll be seeing sh for a long, long time)

I try to avoid bash because it keeps biting me whenever I try to learn it - `x=y` is different than `x = y`, for instance. I want this to die, and the only way for it to die is for people to stop using it.

Yes, it'll never truly die, but that's also true of COBOL and m4 - and you haven't learned either of those languages I'd guess.

There is a 'Coming to Nu' section of the nushell book which covers 'how do I do x' coming from other shells: https://www.nushell.sh/book/coming_from_bash.html

> Along those lines, a quick way to drive adoption could be a huge "how do i do x" or recipes page to Ctrl+F through. If I have to search the internet for how to do x in nushell/fish/etc, I might as well stick to arcane bash - at least you know someone has had the same problem before.

https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr

Reply on news.ycombinator.com