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Like programming in bash (lemmy.ml)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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[–] 3 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

A shell script can be much more agile, potent, and concise, depending on the use case.

E.g. if you want to make a facade (wrapper) around a program, that's much cleaner in $SHELL. All you're doing is checking which keyword/command the user wanted, and then executing the commands associated with what you want to achieve, like maybe displaying a notification and updating a global environment variable or something.

Executing a bunch of commands and chaining their output together in python is surely much more cumbersome than just typing them out next to each other separated by a pipe character. It's higher-level. 👍

If it's just text in text out though, sure, mostly equivalent, but for me this is rarely the use case for a script.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    I'm not anti bash or fish, I've written in both just this week, but if we're talking about readability/syntax as this post is about, and you want an alternative to bash, I'd say python is a more natural alternative. Fish syntax is still fairly ugly compared to most programming languages in my opinion.

    Different strokes for different folks I suppose.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Fish syntax is still fairly ugly compared to most programming languages in my opinion.

    subprocess.run(["fd", "-t", "d", "some_query"])

    vs

    fd -t d some_query

    Which is cleaner? Not to mention if you want to take the output from the command and pipe it into another one.

    It's not about folks with weird opinions or otherwise, it's about use cases. 🙂 I don't think python is any more "natural" than most other imperative languages.

    Fish is probably even more natural, actually, due to it being more high level and the legibility of the script is basically dependent on the naming of the commands and options and variables used within it, rather than something else, just like python. They probably have similarly legible keywords. Fish I imagine has fewer, which is a good thing for legibility. A script does a lot more with a lot less, due to the commands themselves doing so much behind the scenes. There's a lot more boilerplate to a "proper" programming language than a scripting language.

    But if you want to do something that python is better suited for, like advanced data processing or number crunching, or writing a whole application, then I would say that would be the better choice. It's not about preference for me when it comes to python vs fish, it's about the right tool for the job. But if we're talking about bash vs fish, then I'm picking fish purely by preference. 👍

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