Comment by ssivark 10 months ago
The advertisement promises a combination of bash and lisp. So it makes me wonder -- why couldn't we just use lisp?
What are the affordances needed for a "scripting" language (or for interactive use) vis-a-vis more "production use? Is it just about having minimal boilerplate, and a large corpus of ready-to-use functions in the namespace?
Regarding minimal syntax: https://yosefk.com/blog/i-cant-believe-im-praising-tcl.html
Yeah, it really is like that.
I've tried a couple of times to switch to things like IPython as my shell. And what nukes it every time is that while it may be better at the complicated commands I run maybe 1% of the time if you actually look at an unmodified history,
cd("some dir")
cd som TAB ENTER
It doesn't look like it when you're doing it once, but when you're doing it dozens of times a minute it adds up fast.
In addition to "space is function application" another important shell affordance seems to be "words are just words" -- you don't have to quote simple strings like `README.md`. If you want a single string with more than one word (where there is a space in between), that is in conflict with "space is function application", so then you have to put it in quotes.
https://github.com/babashka/babashka
Granted, if you're saying why can't we have the shell also... well, now you're talking about Emacs.
"Is it just about having minimal boilerplate"
That's a lot of it, but I think people don't realize how every keystroke counts with shell.
There's only a handful of languages where the "apply function" operator is space. Shell is one of them. (Haskell & Forth are the other two I know off the top of my head, possibly Factor (concatenative in general tends this way).) Most new shells that are successful copy this. I don't think that's a coincidence. Lisp's abundance of parens is something that people will have trouble with, even Lisp programmers, because this is not the usual whining about a foreign language paradigm and not being used to reading parens... this is literally about the effort required to physically enter them with a keyboard.