[jernfrost]

Interesting seeing so many fish fans. I absolutely love fish. It makes my everyday shell usage so much nicer. But it seems like a totally unknown shell to most people. I never see anybody else use it at any job I've had.

I did use fish a bit as a script language, but I decided for anything of any size I much prefer Julia. For typical file system navigation, fish is better, but Julia is actually pretty decent as a shell, despite being a real language. So writing shell scripts in it is pretty nice.

In the beginning I wrote separate programs executed from fish shell. But now I just fire up Julia as a shell and run functions directly there interactively.

[dilap]

I remember a few years ago poking at julia and thinking it would make a really good shell language. The thing that killed it for this use at the time was slow startup; is that better now?

[Sean1708]

Much better, it's certainly worth giving it another go. It's still much slower than Python, but it's quick enough that I don't notice it all.

  $ time julia -e 'println("Hi")'
  Hi

  real    0m0.241s
  user    0m0.216s
  sys     0m0.196s
  $ time python3 -c 'print("Hi")'
  Hi
  
  real    0m0.046s
  user    0m0.020s
  sys     0m0.000s

[dilap]

Inspired me to install and try; about 350ms on my macbook pro. Much better than it used to be, but still more than you'd want for everyday commands (at least if you're picky about having your computer feel responsive, which I am). :-)