awesome-tagged-templates VS murex

When zx first appeared, it was a tiny esm script that just proposed a new idea for how child_process.spawn API could be enhanced with string template literals.

The template combines HTML and JavaScript. To understand this approach, consider how PHP pages are generated. In PHP, code is embedded within the HTML. Similarly, this library leverages JavaScript template literals to achieve the same objective. From the definition: "Template literals are literals delimited with backtick (`) characters, allowing for multi-line strings, string interpolation with embedded expressions, and special constructs called tagged templates".

The numbers we are printing are monetary values so they are missing a decimal value and a currency symbol. One way we can do this is by using JavaScript template literals to append and prepend the pieces we are missing.

Tagged templates[0], the language feature that enables this, were introduced in ECMAScript 2015 apparently – arguably at least somewhat new in the lifespan of JavaScript. :)

Java is getting a similar feature with template processors[1]. It would be nice to have it in Python as well – i.e. not just f-strings, but something that (like tagged templates) allows a template function process the interpolated values to properly encode them for whatever language is appropriate (e.g. shell, SQL, HTML, etc.).

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

[1] https://openjdk.org/jeps/459

References: Template literals (Template strings)

We are using a string template literal to create the tag and the ${} syntax to provide string interpolation, that is, substituting the values of href and altText into our string.

In TypeScript, a string literal type is a type that represents a specific set of string values. For example, the type "red" | "green" | "blue" represents the set of three string values "red", "green", and "blue". Template literal types allow you to perform operations on these string literal types using the same syntax as template literal strings in JavaScript.

The example also showcases the use of inline templates, employing JavaScript Template Literals. The JSON data obtained from the GET request is accessible through the "data" variable.

These are called "tagged templates": https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

This is how murex works too https://github.com/lmorg/murex/blob/master/config/defaults/p...

I agree. I’ve written about this before but this is what murex (1) does. It reimplements some of coreutils where there are benefits in doing so (eg sed, grep etc -like parsing of lists that are in formats other than flat lines of text. Such as JSON arrays)

Mutex does this by having these utilities named slightly different to their POSIX counterparts. So you can use all of the existing CLI tools completely but additionally have a bunch of new stuff too.

Far too many alt shells these days try to replace coreutils and that just creates friction in my opinion.

1. https://murex.rocks

This is exactly what Murex shell does. It has lots of builtin tools for querying structured data (of varying formats) but also supports POSIX pipes for using existing tools like `jq` et al seamlessly too.

https://murex.rocks

Stable is a problem because a lot of these shells don’t offer any guarantees for breaking changes.

My own shell, https://github.com/lmorg/murex is committed to backwards compatibility but even here, there are occasional changes made that might break backwards compatibility. Though I do push back on such changes as much as possible, to the extent that most of my scripts from 5 years ago still run unmodified.

This is similar to how my shell works. It still just passes bytes around but additionally passes information about how those bytes could be interpreted. A schema if you will. So it works as cleanly with POSIX / GNU / et al tools as it does with fancy JSON, YAML, CSV and other document formats.

It basically sits somewhere between Powershell and Bash: typed pipelines like Powershell but without sacrificing familiarity with all the CLI commands you already use day in and day out.

https://github.com/lmorg/murex

As an aside, I’m about to drop a massive update in the next few days that will make the shell even more intuitive to use.