[Steltek]

I couldn't possibly use a shell that wasn't also a decent shell script. It seems my natural progression is always:

1. "Hand written" commands in shell

2. Shell script with copy-pasted commands from interactive session

2b. Evolved shell script with getopt. Complexity level beginning to tickle the spidey sense that it's too big.

3. Node.js script (I can write Python but JS seems infinitely nicer)

fish would break the 1->2 transition, sending me straight to 3 before I've really gotten a handle on the problem domain.

[tharne]

Perhaps it's just personal preference, but in what world is JS "infinitely nicer" than python?

[handrous]

I'm really far from a JS fanboy, but Python's whitespace thing really is annoying enough that I avoid it when possible.

Ruby'd be my pick for "most-pleasant scripting language" so long as I can avoid any libraries/frameworks that do too much metaprograming "gee, wouldn't you love to never be able to track down where this is defined?" crap. Maybe Lua, but deps are a bit of a pain to manage there, and it's a huge step down in third party library availability compared with the other three languages here mentioned.

Really, if not for up-to-date library availability being higher in other languages, I'd probably still be using Perl for everything. It feels more "command-line native" than the other options. Installed everywhere. The community's not too in-love with trendy, cute bullcrap. A project you wrote five years ago will probably still run fine with no effort. It's kinda like supercharged bash with way fewer footguns.

[tharne]

I've been seeing a lot of pro-perl comments here on HN. Never used it myself, may have to check it out.

[handrous]

Beware that it was created at a time when many programs were written in plain text editors, with no syntax highlighting or autocompletion, with the printed-book language manual on your desk, on a screen that could legibly display only a small fraction of the text that a modern display can (or even ones that came along a few years later). Hence: sigils for variables (though unlike PHP these make some sense and are actually used to do things, and aren't just there because... well, because Perl did it, so PHP should too, I guess); single-character magical variables for very commonly-used loop- or input-related variables; et c.

I don't think anyone would make something quite like it these days, starting form scratch.

[Steltek]

Sorry, I didn't mean to start a flame war. I find regexes, HOF, and especially asyncio/Promises much more palatable in JS, which are things I look forward to when moving out of shell scripting land.