[e3b0c]

I think that both languages for the large and for the small have their own places. Something optimized for the large-scale doesn't automatically work well for the small.

For example, I always feel that Tcl is better than Python for GDB scripting. At least, I really don't like typing parentheses in an interactive console. Also, there is no 'real' (read: general purpose) programming language that is able to beat BASH in terms of ergonomics, even though we all know BASH sucks when the program is getting large.

[yoz-y]

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I'll say that Perl is better than bash for BASH like stuff in every possible way.

[jerf]

If by the "ergonomics" of bash, e3b0c meant the interactive usage, I'd have to agree that bash is a much better interactive shell. Once you start programming it, though, it gets bad fast.

One of my heterodox opinions is that "shell" is actually two languages, an interactive language for moving around the system and executing commands, and a non-interactive language for programming system interactions, and they really shouldn't be the same thing because there's a list of things as long as my arm that should be one way for one case and the other way for the other. "Error handling", for instance, is an entire category on its own; what a human sitting at a shell wants and what a program wants are just night and day different, and at least one side is going to lose if you try to straddle the gap with one language.