PMpmarreck·Jan 4, 2022
The other day I wrote this bash code after getting frustrated with the password generators available to me, just so I had something to use right in the shell:
https://gist.github.com/pmarreck/f4dbb02396c4532762a7a64511c...
It actually took an entire afternoon and went through a couple iterations, and I hadn't even written a test for it yet (and it just so happens that I started an MVP shell-script testing library for just such an occasion when I ALSO got frustrated with the bash-accessible testing libraries available to me, also in Bash: https://github.com/pmarreck/tinytestlib)
But then I immediately felt bad. I could have written all of this in less than an hour in a language like Elixir, with test coverage (and the testing/assertion lib is built-in, so it would have been free).
It is impressive and code-golfish that someone can "write a
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webserver in pure Bash" but Bash is a crap language to script in at this point, and adding more Bash code to the world just seems wrong now. Bourne shells were invented in the 70's (!), long before many language advancements and understandings, and they thus have MANY warts (many of which we're familiar with).
The next time I feel the urge to code anything more than a one-liner in Bash, I'm writing it in elixir script https://thinkingelixir.com/2019-04-running-an-elixir-file-as... and just sucking up the extra run time (or compiling it into an executable with something like https://github.com/spawnfest/bakeware/ and sucking up the extra megabytes), and then MAYBE writing a wrapper function for my .profile
Incidentally, if you DO want a shell that "tastes like" Bourne but is functional and thus sucks a lot less, check out https://github.com/wryun/es-shell, or my fork of it https://github.com/pmarreck/es-shell/