Bash

“all the compilers and parsers and file searchers and so on are all invoked via bash”

“For the things shell is good at (running other commands, pipes, and shuffling files), I have yet to find anything even close to as good.”

“bash can also express concurrency easily, with sync and async support for each command”

“the philosophy of simple composable tools tied together with the Unix shell has proven remarkably difficult to improve upon”

“The tool is called bash and optimized api is grep, the storage is the file system.”

“The overhead of using languages compared to the previous is partly why I keep using bash or Tcl.”

“a "shell" that does not natively run the executable programs you type is a non-starter as a shell.”

“there’s a high likelihood that these tools will always be available on any machine”

“it's still incredibly useful as it's everywhere and has a far greater lifespan than almost anything else”

“Yes, Bash or any shell is a very complex and utterly environment dependent language to approach with all due care for security and compatibility”

“vim and bash, unlike some software, doesn't just go and change its config every few years!”

“A real problem with bash in particular is that it had many incompatible features which were masked with bash's POSIX mode.”

“Bash is designed for the odd system function and that this is niche. However if it's all you got, eh, go for it.”

“Weird footguns don't matter if you stick to using shell for control flow, composition, and interpolation”

“lots of weird footguns, lack of basic features and data types, and spawning subprocesses for everything”

“I've seen enough broken python installs (even with stdlib) to put my faith in /dev/tcp working in bash”

“Bash has added very few features beyond what was already quasi-standard in UNIX shells.”

“Bash maintainer actually implemented the library feature I suggested and it's already dramatically cut down the amount of unsightly bash code I need to keep around and maintain.”

“It's not "denial" to acknowledge that an already-fast program has a faster replacement and then get back to working on the bottlenecks.”

“it has an Info file but it says it's just an intro and the manual page is the definitive version”

“both are a difficult/footgun enough language that it greatly helps to start out using it daily”

“bash and sed and suchlike turn out to be the most useful tools for unlocking the abilities of AI agents”

“It also manages container lifecycle (starting on first request, cleanup on connection shutdown).”

“Though bash is not a good programming language, it's indeed flexible for CLI apps.”

“It's so bad that the moment I need even the slightest bit of complexity, I will switch away from bash.”

“I think Bash is interesting in the "I'm glad it works but I detest having to work with it" kind of way.”

“You're scripting on the shell because you're mainly gluing other processes together”

“I believe bash scripts can be anything you want them to be, if they are useful to you then happy day's.”

“I've been happy with Bash, Vim, JetBrains products and Terraform for a very long while.”

“Bash is soo stupid and dangerous, impossible to remember or understand the next day, but great fun.”

“You can often make oneliners that would traditionally be a lot of lines in Python.”

“BASH is a nightmare for bugs and foot-guns unless you make a point of defensive coding”

“the language (being an sh descendant) is honestly horrible for anything more complex than 200-300 lines”

“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.”

“as soon as you require custom data manipulation in any form, you'll run into awkward edge cases”

“My favorite such features are `mapfile` and `lastpipe` for writing in a more functional style”

“Everyone should stop using bash, especially if you have a scripting language you can use already.”

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

“the bash you get on MacOS is bash 3.2 released in 2006 so relying on it for portability might not be a good idea”

“so `#!/usr/bin/env bash` is definitely more portable in that it consistently works”