I hate how much Linux relies on bash scripts, which might be the least portable and least readable scripting language they could’ve chosen

I literally can’t even sync my .bashrc files between Linux systems because the prewritten gobbledegook is different for each system and they aren’t compatible with each other

@kasdeya but, can’t you install something else than bash like zsh or fish and stuff and they have like python config files? i think. idk

@Stellar omg is that a thing? I’ve been kinda scared to try other shells because I don’t want to learn anything too complicated. but I might look into that if it’s not going to take too long to learn

look at this. fucking look at it

Hover to show content

after looking into this a little bit I think I’m going to try fish which seems like it’s meant to be more user-friendly and less archiac than bash

@kasdeya honestly i hate to be bad but bash is so much better than some stuff ive seen (LOOKING AT YOU, PERL) and i prefer it over python by miles as well since i find python incredibly archaic and horrible.

fish and nu (especially nu) are far more readable for the average user, but i like the portability of bash, and fish actually has some things that it makes harder, since its not made for scripts but instead for interactive use.

i use:

• nu for data processing scripts of any sort
• bash for general purpose scripts
• fish for interactive use
• [python never because it is the worst language ever made]

@kasdeya A) There are a bunch of tools for syncing dotfiles, which sounded appealing except that a lot of them have to be adapted to a specific system, so syncing them is actually a bad idea.

B) The different dotfiles for shell startup are especially bad. ~/.bashrc is supposed to be for the user to configure, except distros pre-configure it. On Debian systems, you actually customize ~/.bash_aliases -- and I don't actually have any aliases in it, per se.

@kasdeya oh and the .bashrc stuff is not a problem for me ofc since i only use bash for scripts. and fish is much better there because it has a conf.d, where each program makes its own .fish file that gets run along with the actual custom fish config

@kasdeya Several times I've had to relearn where to modify my $PATH to include my ~/bin whether I'm in a login shell or not, and how to do it without duplicates. It's different on Fedora or Debian.

@tudbut omg I’ve actually never heard of nu before - what is that?

also it really surprises me to hear that Python is archaic to you! is it missing features that you would want it to have, or is it more about the overall approach that it takes as a scripting language?

also what’s a conf.d? I’ve heard that fish is able to suggest command-line flags - is that how it does that? like each command has its own conf.d script that returns a list of flags?

omg first impressions of fish are that it is drastically nicer to use and configure and it’s way user-friendlier too. I made a mistake in my fish config and it not only told me the exact mistake that I made but it showed me the exact line and suggested an alternative that worked

unless fish starts doing stuff that frustrates me I might use it from now on

@kasdeya

yeah, fish is really really nice tbh

@kasdeya I find the worst offender in this regard to be install scripts. Naturally when making one, one needs to make assumptions about the file system and where dependencies can be found. Nope, I'm a Nix user, it ain't there, you can stop looking now.

Even the eduroam installer from my university fell into this trap, and I had to take the script under surgery to extract the important bits since it couldn't find the stuff it needed from where it expected to find it, despite it all being installed. Yay!

@kasdeya i never used anything else than oh-my-zsh so i don’t know but it could also be useful for me to centralize my profile amongst all my machines

@kasdeya nushell is a shell that is basically a pretty normal programming language except also kinda shell style.

conf.d is a dir with configs inside that are just like the main config. imagine if bashrc was split into many files basically. completions in fish are insane, you should try them, but theyre not done with conf.d, theyre system wide because installing stuff user-side usually means trouble in one way or another, unless the program itself is also installed for the user only. completions are in a different set of folders, one for the system, one for the user.

python just mostly has the issues for me that it feels like the worst aspects of scripting and compiling combined, with none of the good ones, and kinda bad syntax - especially for interactive use. the standard library and module system is also a bit… not great, imo. even the theoretical advantage of being readable tends to disappear in practice, though ive seen readable python code too of course. worst of all though, the language feels really “opaque” even after using it a bit - it doesnt seem to follow a fully consistent philosophy in how the language and stdlib work. maybe i just havent used it enough, but yeah - it feels like i can never really wrap my head around its design no matter what, its all memorizing stuff where others have a much more consistent and transparent design. i can elaborate more on this later if you want, but i dont really want to spend super much time on this because i consider any time i spend thinking about python to be a waste of that time :p - i replace things that might otherwise be done in python with either bash, nu, java, or rust, depending on what it is that i want to make. i suppose part of the issue with python is that it works for making anything, but is truly good at nothing - and i know enough languages to find one better than python for every use case i can think of.

@kasdeya https://www.nushell.sh/

@kasdeya oh and python actually dissuaded a friend of mine from learning programming for a while when he tried to learn it with python and it spat out errors not even i who had been coding for several years at that point could entirely comprehend the reason for.

i then showed him javascript a few weeks later after which he felt more confident again. not that javascript is a great language, of course, but its still better than python, imo, and decent to learn with because it is very forgiving and its pitfalls (except async) usually dont matter in code that will never run in prod or get very complex/deep (being beginner code). when it comes to going beyond the basics i would then teach java or maybe rust of course, since javascript belongs in the browser and not the command line (because only in the browser is it actually pretty good).

@kasdeya fish is goated and the default shell on every one of my machines

@kasdeya i've been using fish ever since i heard about it. i don't *have* to configure it, and if i want to it's reasonably straightforward (i have a nice right-prompt for git info)

i know other people swore by zsh but having to configure it just for it to behave nicely was a nonstarter lol. fish comes with UX out of the box

@kasdeya @tudbut +1 to javascript being a better starter language. i have a bunch of languages under my belt and i don't actively prefer JS day to day, but i still recommend JS because it's so easy to get going with

also +1 to disappointment with python; even among similar languages it always felt like a less enjoyable Ruby

@liese adding git info to my prompt does actually sound pretty nice - I might add that too eventually. but yeah I love that it comes with really nice defaults out-of-the-box and I don’t have to see any confusing arcane script stuff inside of my config file either

@liese @kasdeya

less enjoyable Ruby

SO TRUE OMG yeah i did ruby for a small time and it genuinely felt so much better

@liese @kasdeya zsh would be a perfect interactive shell if it came with grml config out of the box