this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2024
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Bash being on the same level as actually fake code is a pretty hot take to me. What are your opinions on Python, or Ruby, or any other interpreted language? You could very well use them as your login shell, just like Bash if you wanted. In your eyes, if Bash *isn't * a programming language at all, how do you describe a programming language? Languages that express code are just the same as languages that write stories, and whether you do it in German or Vietnamese makes no difference on what story you can write.
When you describe a language as constricted what do you mean? Bash can do anything Python or Rust can do, each of them is just specialized to being better at specific aspects for human convenience in writing code. There is no inherit limitation on what can be done by the language you use to express it.
it's definitely a hot take, you could theoretically use any other language as a shell, and i know you sort of can with stuff like node as well.
But those aren't shell languages, and bash isn't a true language, in the sense that it was explicitly designed to be used in the shell environment, i also consider it to be "pseudocode" because it's not actually bash doing things a pretty significant amount of time you'll stuff something into sed or awk, which are actually different interpreters all together.
bash is almost a sort of wrapper, between a bunch of different programs that all handle things differently, allowing you to glue them back together to make something usable. It's close enough to being it's own language, that you could make it one, but it's not, because it's not supposed to be one.
i suppose that's pretty much what i mean when i say constricted.