alt Hacker NewsMad genius stuff, this.
However... scripting requires (in my experience), a different ergonomic to shippable software. I can't quite put my finger on it, but bash feels very scriptable, go feels very shippable, python is somewhere in the middle, ruby is closer to bash, rust is up near go on the shippable end.
Good scripting is a mixture of OS-level constructs available to me in the syntax I'm in (bash obviously is just using OS commands with syntactic sugar to create conditional, loops and variables), and the kinds of problems where I don't feel I need a whole lot of tooling: LSPs, test coverage, whatever. It's languages that encourage quick, dirty, throwaway code that allows me to get that one-off job done the guy in sales needs on a Thursday so we can close the month out.
Go doesn't feel like that. If I'm building something in Go I want to bring tests along for the ride, I want to build a proper build pipeline somewhere, I want a release process.
I don't think I've thought about language ergonomics in this sense quite like this before, I'm curious what others think.
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I know what you mean.
For me, the dividing line is how compact the language representation is, specifically if you can get the job done in one file or not.
I have no doubt that there's a lot of Go jobs that will fit in a 500 line script, no problem. But the language is much more geared towards modules of many files that all work together to design user-defined types, multi-threading, and more. None of that's a concern for BASH, with Python shipping enough native types to do most jobs w/o need for custom ones.
If you need a whole directory of code to make your bang-line-equipped Go script work, you may as well compile that down and install it to /usr/local/bin.
Also the lack of bang-line support in native Go suggests that everyone is kinda "doing it wrong". The fact that `go run` just compiles your code to a temporary binary anyway, points in that direction.
> bash obviously is just using OS commands with syntactic sugar
No, bash is technically not "more" OS than e.g. Python. It just happens that bash is (often) the default shell in the terminal emulator.
bash to me is the C++ of scripting. There are a bunch of arcane rules which all have to be followed, forget a single one of them and you've got a vulnerability.
Maybe the ergonomics of writing code is less of a problem if you have a quick way of asking an LLM to do the edits? We can optimize for readability instead.
More specifically, for the readability of code written by an LLM.
Talking about Python "somewhere in the middle" - I had a demo of a simple webview gtk app I wanted to run on vanilla Debian setup last night.. so I did the canonical-thing-of-the-month and used uv to instantiate a venv and pull the dependencies. Then attempted to run the code.. mayhem. Errors indicating that the right things were in place but that the code still couldn't run (?) and finally Python Core Dumped.. OK. This is (in some shape or form) what happens every single time I give Python a fresh go for an idea. Eventually Golang is more verbose (and I don't particularly like the mod.go system either) but once things compile.. they run. They don't attempt running or require xyz OS specific hack.