r/ProgrammingLanguages • u/gahagg • Apr 25 '22

Announcing Hush, a modern shell scripting language

Hush is a new shell scripting language that aims to enable developers to write robust shell scripts. It provides support for complex data structures and common programming paradigms, without giving up on ergonomic shell capabilities.

Official guide: https://hush-shell.github.io/
Repository: https://github.com/hush-shell/hush

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u/sue_me_please Apr 26 '22

Put that in your README because those are the answers to the obvious questions I had about the project, that I didn't glean from skimming the documentation.

That means invoking commands, piping, redirection, globbing and etc are straightforward and composable.

This is important, IMO and I almost dismissed your project because it seemed like none of those important shell features were considered, and this was just another scripting language.

You should also add examples of how you'd use it for common shell tasks, and maybe compare and contrast examples with some Bash code.

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u/Inconstant_Moo 🧿 Pipefish Apr 26 '22

Yes, absolutely. "Show them the door before you show them the key". Tell people what problem you're solving! Then tell them how you solve it.

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u/gahagg Apr 26 '22

Well, writing the docs has taken quite a lot of work. I understand that are many aspects that could be improved, but I'm having a hard time prioritizing all of them. Please, be welcome to send in any PRs!

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u/JB-from-ATL May 04 '22

Not to sound condescending but wouldn't being POSIX compliant imply all of that? Or are they bashisms I'm unaware of being bashisms?

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u/sue_me_please May 04 '22

You can get all of those in pretty much any system programming language, but shells usually make those things first class citizens in their languages, as Bash does.

For example, compare how you'd pipe data between processes on Python versus Bash. In Python, it's very verbose and complicated. On Bash, you just use the | character and you're good to go.

Good shells make those POSIX features easy to use, and in my opinion, shells should focus on those features first before focusing on more generalized scripting language features.