I've grown rather fond of bash in my current role. I work mainly on developer tools and CI pipelines, both of which mean gluing together lots of different CLI tools. When it comes to this kind of work I think it is quite hard to beat the expressiveness of shell scripting. I say this as a former hater of bash and its syntax.
Much credit to copilot and shellcheck, which have made complex bash ever the more write-only language than it already was.
(2010)
Sadly the video seems to be missing; the whole GoGaRuCo conference site is gone, actually.
Maybe it makes more sense to post the link to YT, as you did in 2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32521080
And its inspiration is still great but could use a refresh: https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf
Getting a DNS error from confreaks.
You can get the video here:
* https://web.archive.org/web/20140207100122/http://confreaks....
A video is not a handbook. A handbook is a book. There's a clue in the name.
Life is too short for videos.
I'm not familiar with the landscape - is there a "compiles to reasonably-readable [ba]sh" language that's gotten any traction anywhere? That seems like at least an interesting possible solution.
If you're a shell hater, the answer isn't to write MORE shell, but to switch to something else, for the love of all things sane and normal.
YouTube link for video if it's broken for others and not just me:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olH-9b3VJfs
Something I learned recently is that the Bourne shell (and by extension, bash and POSIX's sh) have syntax inspired by Algol 68 (source [0]), which explains some of the funkyness. One thing I've been doing recently is writing scripts in rc, the default shell for plan9. It's a bit saner syntax-wise IMO. Versions linked against readline have file-based completion, but it's otherwise not quite robust enough for me to switch away from fish as my default, but it has some things I prefer over both bash and fish.
I encourage people to give rc and awk a shot, they're both small and learnable in an afternoon!
[0]: https://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/rc