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A comment on The fish shell is amazing. Parent comment

Re:The fish shell is amazing by R0b0t1 on Thursday November 25, 2021 @07:59PM (#29346585)
It's more "why not write scripts?" Actually making use of a shell's control structures is code smell until we have far better shells than we currently do. They're optimized for user interaction, not necessarily anything else.
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Re:The fish shell is amazing by pxc on Thursday November 25, 2021 @08:17PM (#29346673)
If you're gonna be calling a lot of external programs and interacting with files a lot, non-shell scripting languages tend to feel pretty clunky.

I know what you mean, though. Most shell languages don't feel like flexible, expressive programming languages in the way that they ought to and could.

As you may know, there are some new shells/languages that are trying to bridge the gap in a way that still leaves the shell well-suited to interactive use. The Oil shell wiki has a great list of them (and Oil is one such shell itself, of course): https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Alternative-Shells

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Re:The fish shell is amazing by remexre on Thursday November 25, 2021 @09:03PM (#29346885)
> If you're gonna be calling a lot of external programs and interacting with files a lot, non-shell scripting languages tend to feel pretty clunky.

Perl's actually pretty good here; I'm pretty new to it, but it's generally what I reach for when I feel like a bash script has gotten just a bit too complicated.

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Re:The fish shell is amazing by R0b0t1 on Friday November 26, 2021 @03:54AM (#29348498)
Perl definitely is the sweet spot. Even then, I think python with multiprocessing and the pipe class is better than bash in some circumstances.

If all you're doing is `a | b | c | d` then use bash but if you're pulling stuff out of the middle in a loop, yeah, might want to use a real language.

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