Are You in Love with Bash?

Will be interesting if this takes off. I think, on net, HN is a bit triggered by shell/bash.

I guess I have a love-hate relationship with it.

- It can be a real pain.

- There's something in the pliable near-human-language of it that just almost throws sparks. I brain dumped a bit about what I mean in https://gist.github.com/abathur/d1da98819824656b0993a3716951...

- It has lots of little quirks and arcana, so it can be ~intellectually stimulating to play around with. Using aliases for ~metaprogramming is a fun time, for example.

No, it's a real pain, and doing a lot of ostensibly ordinary things is always harder than I expect. I end up having to block out my entire day if I have to work on a moderately complex one, and it would always have been faster to use a cross platform language like C# to make a shell application in retrospect.

I admit that for the simplest of jobs it's fine, I guess.

It’s the worst except for all the other shell languages.

It wouldn’t suck if someone would at least find a way to modernize the experience and make spme of the commands more intuitive to the beginner.

Powershell is ok, a step in the right direction, but its coupling to windows is a turnoff to me of course

No.

It is slow. But, it also bears the inertial weight of its age. I'll go zsh if, for some reason, I decide it's time to rewrite everything I've written currently backed by bash. I do not see that happening soon, though.

It's best to not love any technology so you can make nonemotional choices of the best tool for the job