Re:Intercal, YAML, and Other Horrible Programming Languages
by stelonix on Friday February 26, 2021 @04:44PM
(#26280188)
Yeah I'm a big fan of Oil and hopefully in 10-20 years it'll be the standard language of shells. Also I did notice the spaces issues when attempting shell but it was only from reading your post sometime ago that I found out it was a deliberate language design choice.
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Re:Intercal, YAML, and Other Horrible Programming Languages
by chubot on Friday February 26, 2021 @06:33PM
(#26281113)
It should be usable for "cloud config" files long before that! :) But yes changing existing code at the lower distro level has a lot more inertia.
The cloud is basically built on top of Linux distros, so that part is easier to change and is rapidly evolving.
You could say that the = issue is deliberate, but I'd say the core problem is that shell didn't start out as a programming language, or at least it was a very impoverished one without variables.
The original paper from the 70's on the Thompson shell shows that. Shell had "goto" but no variables! So name=value had to be grafted on later without breaking too many things. Words were already split by spaces, so I guess they just made
name=value
name = value