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Re:The Awk Programming Language (1988) [pdf] by kqr on Thursday May 24, 2018 @03:19AM (#17141760)
One has to recall that there were some forces that wanted Perl to become a standard shell rather than a programming language. A shell is usually more limited in features, but it is frequently very forgiving, provides many shortcuts, and there are often multiple ways of doing things.

However, I've never believed it to be possible to have a language both as a shell language and a proper programming language for large-scale projects. I believe the two usecases are fundamentally antithetical, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

Re:The Awk Programming Language (1988) [pdf] by oblio on Thursday May 24, 2018 @04:42AM (#17142207)
> However, I've never believed it to be possible to have a language both as a shell language and a proper programming language for large-scale projects. I believe the two usecases are fundamentally antithetical, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

I'd say Powershell proves you right. Powershell has a great design, it has optional typing and access to a cornucopia of libraries via .NET.

Even so, they had to make some compromises because of the shell parts (functions return output, for example) which makes is quite finicky as a "proper" programming language.

On the shell side, the very nice nomenclature which makes it very readable and discoverable makes is annoying sometimes to use as a shell. That and the somewhat unwieldy launch of non-Powershell commands.

Someone who attempts to bridge the two has a ton of work to do, both in the research and in the implementation department. I guess Oil Shell (https://www.oilshell.org/) is the most realistic approach we have today. And it's probably still 1-2 years away from release and many more years from mass adoption (if that ever happens).