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Re:Ask HN: Are alternative (oil, nu, etc.) shells usable as ... by anonyfox on Thursday February 09, 2023 @06:59AM (#34722663)
I am still kinda bitter about mac os replacing the default bash with zsh. I gained nothing from that unwanted update, but got compatibility pains suddenly.

Is something is more complicated than a one-liner, use a real programming language instead, with proper building blocks, tooling and documentation. Use something like Go to crosscompile if you don't want to depend on something on the host machine.

In my experience, even very trivial short shell scripts over time tend to grow into a pain, that could totally be avoided when using a real language instead.

Re:Ask HN: Are alternative (oil, nu, etc.) shells usable as ... by pinkbeanz on Thursday February 09, 2023 @07:04AM (#34722724)
Believe the replacement was because bash 4 was GPL3 licensed, and zsh was not. It wasn’t so much for user benefits than it was for security and licensing.
Re:Ask HN: Are alternative (oil, nu, etc.) shells usable as ... by hulitu on Thursday February 09, 2023 @07:12AM (#34722791)
They could have fix the security bugs.
Re:Ask HN: Are alternative (oil, nu, etc.) shells usable as ... by JonChesterfield on Thursday February 09, 2023 @07:09AM (#34722756)
I've watched a one line bash pipeline turn into a thousand line python program over the course of about a week. It didn't need new functionality, it was just not proper engineering to leave it in bash.

We never did agree on whether that was right or not. It was something involving digging information out of elf binaries where the python libs were much more verbose than the flags passed to readelf (maybe objdump, it was a while ago).

Re:Ask HN: Are alternative (oil, nu, etc.) shells usable as ... by richardwhiuk on Thursday February 09, 2023 @07:36AM (#34723053)
subprocess.check_call() is more verbose than bash, but probably a better option.