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by cjensen 1703 days ago
Christiansen is correct that it is a terrible programming language.

It's a great shell for user input.

1 comments

Yes and no; you do run in to problems with that as well, for example trying to get a git branch in your prompt in a performant way that is rather complex. Things like more advanced aliases or completions will hurt your brain (or at least, they hurt my brain), etc. Also: there is no way to get the line number of an error, so made a mistake in your .tcshrc and it's a pain.

I never especially liked that csh-whynot article as I feel it focuses a bit on the wrong things, and things people rarely use in day-to-day usage.

I used tcsh for many years (as it was the default on FreeBSD, the first system where I seriously used the CLI), but I can't really think of many things it does better than either bash or tcsh nowadays. The only thing is that you can set "noclobber" to "notempty" and "ask", but at least "notempty" was added in zsh recently; AFAIK bash can't do that. It's a small but very useful feature for cases where you type "wrong-cmd > foo" and then up and "wrong-cmd-corrected > foo".