[q3k]

I don't really see the point of this, apart from academic research values.

POSIX shell is everywhere - your current Linux and OS X machines, old UNIX workstations, home routers, servers... Just drop in a file and it will probably run just fine, unless the author screwed something up completely. POSIX shell scripts are the perfect bootstrap mechanisms that will run almost anywhere regardless of architecture.

Haskell, on the other hand, is rarely present in an operating system - if you absolutely, positively need a higher-level language for „shell scripting”, then you have a much higher chance of finding a Perl interpreter, or even Python. Heck, even getting ghc and its' basic ecosystem running has always proved to be a huge burden to me. Try sticking a `cabal install` in your CI flow, you'll see your job times increase by hours.

Third, there's just the KISS aspect of it - if you're writing something that has logic so simple it can be stuck in a shell file, why not just write it in a shell file? You don't need category theory to get a few files installed...

[comex]

Because shell is so deficient that even for "simple" things it is really easy to screw up - when whitespace or special characters in filenames cause some case you overlooked to screw up due to terrible quoting rules, when missing arguments cause [1], when you accidentally put bashisms in scripts labeled /bin/sh, when you suddenly have to do some basic text parsing (e.g. extracting capture groups from a regex) and have to either switch to perl or use some ugly bash extension that's incompatible between the version of bash OS X uses and the newer ones.

So you might want to use a different language - even for purely/mostly personal use, in which case Haskell would be fine.

[1] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/3671

[regularfry]

That's before you've even addressed the stultifying features of shell as a language: booleans and tests are odd, arrays are odder, they have things called "functions" which don't have return values, the list goes on. Basically if you're writing shell, you probably also have at least Perl available, and probably Python...

[sbergot]

It is a bit easy to dismiss everything haskell related as only useful for "academic research". In fact I am not sure how do you make this link between this post and research at all.

Now if you don't know about haskell and want to write a quick and short lived script, there is 0 value in writing it in haskell. However, if you happen to now a bit of haskell and that your script is likely to be used several times you might find some benefits to this.

- haskell is quick to write and the code can be quite terse. You can create an myscript.hs file and run it with runhaskell. Zero platform complexity overhead.

- you get the benefits of static types which are easier maintenance and refactoring.

- if it evolves in anything more complex, it is easy to move it in a cabal project.

- if you need to do something cpu intensive, you can compile/profile/improve perfs.

[Peaker]

The "Academic" language and "Category Theory" strawmen is getting tiring...

Many of us who use Haskell do so (without an academic degree or almost any CT knowledge, by the way) because it offers the best bang for our buck -- less code, more safety, more stuff done and done well! It also runs reasonably fast, unlike similarly terse languages.

Being able to use it in a light-weight manner for one-off scripts is nice too.

[knivets]

As far as I understand, you need interpreter only if you want to run file as a script, but if you compile beforehand, you can just use it, so no need for Haskell to be present in an operating system.

[q3k]

What's the point then? You just end up with opaque binary blobs that you have to first cross-compile to every possible OS and architecture... How is that scripting by any stretch of the definition?

[rjsw]

What is the point of PowerShell on Windows, you can just use COMMAND.COM.

[iopq]

Fine, have shell scripts rm -rf $VARIABLE/* while other people try to create sane alternatives

Every few years someone writes a retarded install script that wipes your drive, it's like it's inevitable