[DonHopkins]

I was quite clear that this is HISTORICAL baggage whose syntax and semantics we're still suffering from. I corrected it from TWO to THREE and wrote a step by step description of why it was three processes in the other comment. That's the whole point: it was originally a terrible design, but we're still stuck with the syntactic and semantic consequences even today, in the name of "backwards compatibility".

> they usually don't have to be fast since they're usually just used to delegate operations off to other code for performance

Even now you're bending over backwards to make ridiculous rationalizations for the bankrupt "Unix Philosophy". And you're just making my point for me. Does the Unix Philosophy say that the shell should be designed to be slow and inefficient and syntactically byzantine on purpose, or are you just making excuses? Maybe you don't think YOUR shell scripts have to be fast, or easy to write, read, and maintain, or perform simple arithmetic, or not have arsenals of pre-loaded foot guns, but speak for yourself.

[mmcgaha]

When my son was six he found a girly magazine at a friends house and was sneaking away to look at it. When my wife caught him she told him the magazine was bad and he should not be looking at it. His simple reply was "But I like it Mom."

Even if Unix is bad, I like it.

[verandaguy]

I actually didn't mention the Unix philosophy once in my comment, I just explained why the shell snippet you posted is the way it is. As far as I can tell, nobody in this thread's making long-winded ideological arguments about the Unix philosophy except you.

I think it's a perfectly reasonable assessment to think of shell scripts as a glue layer between more complex software. It does a few things well, including abstracting away stuff like pipelining software, navigating file systems, dispatching batch jobs, and exposing the same interface to scripts as you'd use to navigate a command line as a human, interactively.

    > Maybe you don't think YOUR shell scripts have to be fast, or easy to write, read, and maintain, or perform simple arithmetic, or not have arsenals of pre-loaded foot guns, but speak for yourself.

This is the opinion of the vast majority of sysadmins, devops people, and other shell-adjacent working professionals I've encountered during my career. None of them, including myself when I'm wearing a sysadmin hat, deny the shortcomings of bash and friends, but none of us have found anything as stable or ubiquitous that fits this domain remotely as well.

I also reject the idea that faster or more full-featured alternatives lack footguns, pre-loaded or otherwise.

- C has a relatively limited type system by modern standards, no memory safety, no bounds checking, a slew of non-reentrant stdlib functions, UB, and relies on the user to account for all of that to benefit from its speed.

- C++ offers some improvements, but, being a near superset of C, it still has the footguns of its predecessor, to say nothing of the STL and the bloat issues caused by it.

- Rust improves upon C++ by miles, but the borrow checker can bite you in nontrivial ways, the type system can be obtuse under some circumstances, cargo can introduce issues in the form of competing dependency versions, and build times can be very slow. Mutable global state is also, by design, difficult to work with.

- Python offers ergonomic and speed improvements over POSIX shells in some cases, and a better type system than anything in POSIX shells, but it can't compete with most serious compiled languages for speed. It's also starting to have a serious feature bloat issue.

Pick your poison. The reality is that all tools will suck if you use them wrong enough, and most tools are designed to serve a specific domain well. Even general-purpose programming languages like the ones I mentioned have specializations -- you can use C to build an MVC website, yes, but there are better tools out there for most real-world applications in that domain. You can write an optimizing compiler in Ruby, but if you do that, you should reevaluate what life choices led you to do that.

Bash and co. are fine as shell languages. Their syntax is obtuse but it's everywhere, which means that it's worth learning, cause a bash script that works on one host should, within reason, work on almost any other *nix host (plus or minus things like relying on a specific host's directory structure or some such). I'd argue the biggest hurdle when learning are the difference between pure POSIX shell scripting idioms and bashisms, which are themselves very widely available, but that's a separate topic.

[pjmlp]

C was already limited by 1960's standards when compared to PL/I, NEWP and JOVIAL, 1970's standards when compared to Mesa and Modula-2, .....

It got lucky ridding the UNIX adoptiong wave, an OS that got adopted over the others, thanks to having its source available almost at a symbol price of a tape copy, and a book commenting its source code, had it been available as commercial AT&T product at VMS, MVS, et al price points, no one would be talking about UNIX philosophy.

[johnisgood]

> - C has a relatively limited type system by modern standards, no memory safety, no bounds checking, a slew of non-reentrant stdlib functions, UB, and relies on the user to account for all of that to benefit from its speed.

That is a feature, not a bug. Add your own bound checks if you want it, or use Ada or other languages that add a lot of fluff (Ada has options to disable the addition of bound checks, FWIW).

I am fine with Bash too (and I use shellcheck all the time), but I try to aim to be POSIX-compliant by default. Additionally, sometimes I just end up using Perl or Lua (LuaJIT).

[verandaguy]

I never said it wasn't a feature. There was a time, and there are still certain specific domains, where bit bashing the way C lets you is a big benefit to have. But bug or not, I think it's reasonable to call these limitations as far as general-purpose programming goes.

My argument was that C puts the onus on the user to work within those limitations. Implementing your own bounds checks, doing shared memory management, all that stuff, is extra work that you either have to do yourself or know and trust a library enough to use it, and in either case carry around the weight of having to know that nonstandard stuff.

[johnisgood]

You add bounds checks where you want it to.

The warnings of GCC and Clang can help you spot a lot of possible bugs, too, FWIW.

[wpm]

We’re stuck with plenty of non-optimal stuff because of path dependency and historical baggage. So what? Propose something better. Show that the benefits of following the happy path of historical baggage don’t outweigh the outrageously “arcane” and byzantine syntax of…double quotes, brackets, dollar signs, and other symbols that pretty much every other language uses too.