alt Hacker News> bash's syntax is so weird
What should be the syntax according to contemporary IT people? JSON? YAML? Or just LLM prompt?
Replies
Nushell! Or powershell, but I much prefer nushell!
There's a movement to write JSON to fd 3, as a machine-parsable alternative to rickety fd 1.
Trying to be language agnostic: it should be as self-explanatory as possible. 2>&1 is all but.
Why is there a 2 on the left, when the numbers are usually on the right. What's the relationship between 2 and 1? Is the 2 for std err? Is that `&` to mean "reference"? The fact you only grok it if you know POSIX sys calls means it's far from self explanatory. And given the proportion of people that know POSIX sys calls among those that use Bash, I think it's a bit of an elitist syntax.
Tcl
Haskell
Honestly, Python with the "sh" module is a lot more sane.
Nushell, Powershell, Python, Ruby, heck even Perl is better. Shell scripting is literally the worst language I've ever seen in common use. Any realistic alternative is going to be better.