[pxc]

I suppose one characteristic that Oils, resholve, and Nix share is that each is an ambitious attempt to bridge two worlds in order to propagate recent innovations to actually-existing environments that are entangled with complex legacies: Oils with its two frontends/modes/languages that hope to bring the innovations of PowerShell to settings where Bash is deeply entrenched, resholve in trying to add dependency management to a language that has always fundamentally lacked it and has perhaps a uniquely flexible standard of interop, and Nix in trying to bring insights from implementations of functional programming languages (e.g., garbage collection) and their features (immutability, composability) to Unix filesystem hierarchies.

In a way, I suppose resholve also directly shares a goal of Oils itself— namely, to make shell scripts "more like 'real programs'". YSH pursues this goal through more powerful and flexible language constructs, greater facility with data structures, more ergonomic error messages and other feedback for the user, things like that. Resholve pursues this goal by trying to make it possible for shell programs— even shell programs that rely on a mixture of third-party programs from God-knows-where— can be more portable, less sensitive to changes in the environment, and more amenable to a kind of static analysis of their behavior and dependencies. And both try to achieve their missions in a "conservative" way, letting users retain (or continue to write) code written in the shell language they're most familiar with.

Certainly here on HN, "disruptive" innovation gets a lot more consideration (and praise). But I think that "conservative" innovation of the kind I've just outlined is sometimes even more ambitious and challenging. It's a great thing to see such projects manage to produce interesting and useful results.

So long live Nix, resholve, and Oils!