little-lang VS nushell

To clarify for others who only follow the link titles, this is not the Tcl-inspired scripting language Lil[1] nor the other Tcl-inspired, C-clothes-wearing Little[2].

[1] http://runtimeterror.com/tech/lil/

[2] https://www.little-lang.org/, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26204218

This is great! I write a lot of one-off utilities that run on my main desktop as web applications backed by sqlite so you're really speaking my language here!

I enjoyed the little bit of exposure that I had to Tcl/Tk through EXPECT, I used to write a lot of embedded test scaffolding using it back in the 00s. I've also been interested in checking out Little Language [0].

Wapp looks like a great place to start with Tcl.

[0]: https://www.little-lang.org/

The last public commit on their GitHub repository was in 2016, so you're probably right, though it's possible there's still internal development. The commit history seems to imply that they have a separate, internal repository that they occasionally sync with the GitHub repo.

The repo is odd, it's hard to tell where the actual little-lang code is. I guess it's in the tclXXX directory?

https://github.com/bitkeeper-scm/little-lang

The first method is through downloading the pre-built binaries. With this method, you don't need to install anything other than Nushell's dependencies. Once you've downloaded the binaries, add them to your system's environment path to run it directly in your terminal.

I rather nushell for this purpose, it's more fun to write and easier to read.

https://www.nushell.sh/

These are just three small examples of what this shell written in Rust allows. The features are many and many more, but I'll leave it up to you to discover and enjoy them; I'm currently playing around with it and it's giving me a lot of satisfaction and immediacy, now it has a fixed place among the tools I use when working! The project is Open Source, so if you want to contribute, I invite you, as always, to do so, I leave you the link to the repo here!

Any thoughts on fish as compared to nushell [0]? It's similar to PowerShell in its philosophy and is also written in Rust.

[0] https://github.com/nushell/nushell

> In PowerShell, structured output is the default and it seems to work very well.

PowerShell goes a step beyond JSON, by supporting actual mutable objects. So instead of just passing through structured data, you effectively pass around opaque objects that allow you to go back to earlier pipeline stages, and invoke methods, if I understand correctly: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof....

I'm rather fond of wrappers like jc and libxo, and experimental shells like https://www.nushell.sh/. These still focus on passing data, not objects with executable methods. On some level, I find this comfortable: Structured data still feels pretty Unix-like, if that makes sense? If I want actual objects, then it's probably time to fire up Python or Ruby.

Knowing when to switch from a shell script to a full-fledged programming language is important, even if your shell is basically awesome and has good programming features.

Maybe if the "popular" shells, but http://www.nushell.sh/ is looking better and better

Yeah agreed, especially now that PowerShell is available cross-platform.

Nushell[1] also seems like a promising alternative, but I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet.

[1]: https://www.nushell.sh/

I also discovered an existing discussion[1] related to this topic which includes a link[2] to a "helper to call nushell nuon/json/yaml commands from bash/fish/zsh" and a comment[3] that the current nushell dev focus is "on getting the experience inside nushell right and [we] probably won't be able to dedicate design time to get the interface of native Nu commands with an outside POSIX shell right and stable.".

[0] https://gitlab.com/RancidBacon/notes_public/-/blob/main/note...

[1] "Expose some commands to external world #6554": https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/6554

[2] https://github.com/cruel-intentions/devshell-files/blob/mast...

[3] https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/6554#issuecomment-...