Comment by ssivark
Comment by ssivark 2 days 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?
"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.