[braindeath]

> Afterwards, you will start to see the shell as a glorious, essential element of our civilization, worth of respect and deserving our careful attention.

Nah.

There should be (probably is) a term for the phenomenon/trope where you can take something that was not carefully designed in the first place (like basically all of Unix) and then down the line you can hyper-analyze the hell out of certain bits of it and wax poetic about the few elegant bits that are inevitably there (even BASIC will work, yes) - while conveniently ignoring the whole is still a steaming pile. Lord knows that's what happened with "Unix" starting in the 90s, and Javascript in the 2000s.

[ailideex]

> something that was not carefully designed in the first place (like basically all of Unix)

While I would generally agree that the Unix shell language (of which bash is a superset) and the bash language itself is not the most elegant and well designed things in the world - and that it should be used in a limited way and there are better options in most cases - I do have to say that to me at least it is significantly better than PowerShell which, while it clearly had a lot of design work put into it, seemed to have been designed by someone who has never used a shell or a terminal and maybe only had some limited interaction with a computer of any kind.

[modo_mario]

>Lord knows that's what happened with "Unix" starting in the 90s, and Javascript in the 2000s.

What do you mean with this bit?

[jacobush]

Unix: a shift from the pragmatic view that Unix is 80% nice and "worse is better" to a mystic longing for a time when everything was a file and you could compose things from well understood utilities which did one thing. (Which never existed, that dream was Plan9.)

Javascript: the idea that it's actually a nice language anyone should use except under duress.