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> One of my coworkers gave me some great perspective by saying, "at least it's not written in Bash!"

I wish bash was the thing that was dying. As an industry, we need to make better choices.





i think this is changing. in recent years, alternative shells that break with bash syntax like fish or elvish and others are gaining in popularity. oils is of particular interest because it has an sh/bash compatible mode and thus provides an upgrade path away from bash.

Indeed. If I had to download and install bash … I wouldn’t!

I write bash scripts only because I can rely on it being there.


There’s nothing that can replace bash for what it does. People have been trying for decades. You’ll be happier if you accept that bash can and will happily coexist with anything and everything else, which is exactly why it will never go away.

>it will never go away

Chet Ramey became the primary maintainer of Bash in the early 1990s and is the sole author of every bash update (and Readline) since then. That would be an enormous task for a team of 100, no less a team of one.

I've become quite a fan (after struggling mightily with its seemingly millions of quirks.


CLI usage revolves around text and bash is a meta layer above that. Given curl, jq, and awk, you can create a quick MVP client for almost any api. Doing the same in Python and Go is much more involved.

Throw in nc and a while loop, and you can have a server too!



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