Well, Perl back in the bad old days (4 and earlier) was very similar in terms of limited "minimum standard" facilities, but tons of people used it as a general purpose scripting language and hacked together some really huge systems.
It's definitely easier/safer to write longer programs in other languages, but with proper discipline it's also possible to write really big, robust programs in Bash/shells--people have done this, and some of that code is probably still running today.
> and some of that code is probably still running today.
A lot of that code is still being written today, which is one of the things that OP is trying to change.
This one gets it. What I want from an interactive shell is not what I want from a programming language.
Re:Why Create a New Unix Shell?
by solarkraft on Thursday February 01, 2018 @05:12AM
(#16280705)
I wondered this while reading the article. Do we really need the same language for commands & for programming? Portability is nice, but it seems like the requirements are a bit different for one-liners vs scripts you need to maintain.
My rough heuristic is, "no more than ten lines, nor more than two variables." Yes, that's short almost to the point of absurdity. The only good thing that one can say about Bash as a scripting language is that it's better than csh. Bash is taken seriously because of its longevity and ubiquity, but it's fundamentally limited in what it can express, and it is quite trivial to exceed those limitations.