[alexhutcheson]

POSIX shell is miserable for programming anything beyond a couple lines. It doesn't even have arrays[1], so you have no available container types within the interpreter itself.

[1] Well, it has $@, which you can use as a general-purpose array with some hacks[2], but that's no way to live.

[2] http://www.etalabs.net/sh_tricks.html

[Spivak]

I don't think it's too unreasonable to assume that you'll be able to find bash anywhere you'd find a general purpose python installation and it has plenty of niceties.

But even the nicest shell doesn't solve the dependency problem like statically compiled programs. If I could take my currently running Python code and produce some artifact that would run with nothing other than the python binary I think we'd be in a much better place.

Ohh apparently all I've needed in my life is zipapps.

[alexhutcheson]

Agreed that Bash is (relatively) fine, although error prone. My comment was about POSIX shell, which has none of the features (arrays, [[ instead of [, etc.) that make programming tolerable in Bash.

One drawback is that if you want your Bash script to work on macOS, you need to restrict yourself to features that exist on version 3.2 (from 2006) because that's the latest version that will ever be included on macOS by default.

> If I could take my currently running Python code and produce some artifact that would run with nothing other than the python binary I think we'd be in a much better place.

See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23338316

[moreaccountspls]

That's a matter of opinion. I don't find using "$@" to be a big deal in practice.

Let me put it like this: I'm a programmer. I don't mind making programming a bit harder for myself if it means that I get to avoid a lot of the non-programing minutia that's part of a modern interpreted environment.

Also, if you're willing to take a dependency on jq, the issue goes away completely.