nushell VS jq

I've been using nushell as my daily driver shell for a while. It's still very much in development, but it's got some nice features, like Windows cross compatibility, proper data types, and syntax highlighting

Now, I guess the deeper question is ‶is the text-based, line-delimited, pipe-oriented, interaction model between programs that don't know each other still relevant″; and we have seen new, more structured, approaches being tested, for instance with PowerShell or NuShell.

You can install PowerShell on Linux now, if you like - or there's nushell: https://www.nushell.sh/

I'll add the long awaited support for nushell in broot.

But that and xplr are both programs used within the shell and don't address that the shell is still outputting plain-dumb-dataless-text. https://www.nushell.sh/ promotes right on the homepage Everything is data so it's exciting to see and hope for a better future!

I don't understand what you mean by Graphics integration or graphical frontend. Do you have an example? Instead of du - I recommend dust. The data features - are basically the features of nushell, are you using it? Regarding the variables - excellent idea, I will implement this. What do you mean by menu creation? What syntax would you use for "skip next line"?

> Different components can integrate and coordinate through standards.

We've tried that and for the most part, it doesn't actually work in practice. Hell, it doesn't even work between standard Unix programs. They don't "integrate and coordinate" at all. They just push unstructured text around, and in some cases that's sufficient to perform some very basic compound tasks.

There is an upcoming project though that tries to make Unix pipelines work the way they are supposed to: Nushell[1]. It has real composability with strongly typed data that flows between commands.

Guess how they're doing it? Yup, that's right: They're building it all as a monolithic system where the entire pipeline is supervised and interpreted by the shell. Unix is too fragmented and standards are too difficult to develop and implement for any other approach to be realistically feasible. "Small programs" are an evolutionary dead end.

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

Finally, I really do recommend looking into Nushell. It should give you a much better idea of how a shell could work if it weren't tied to ASCII blobs as its core data type.

If you're discontent with the state of shell scripting, you should give nushell a try: nushell.sh

If structured data is what excites you about pwsh, you should check out nushell: https://www.nushell.sh/. It is cross-platform like pwsh, and takes a similar approach to structured data, but has a much simpler syntax that I find more readable and much nicer to type than pwsh.

🪛 jq

3) Install the jq utility on your computer. jq is a json parser/filter. https://stedolan.github.io/jq/

Repo author here, let me promote jq a bit – it's much more than a simple command-line JSON processor you know it for:

* It is a generator-based language which means you operate streams of values rather than single values. Takes some time to get used to, but you'd never want to go back to traditional model, at least for data processing. See 'Generators and iterators' section of the man page: https://github.com/stedolan/jq/blob/cff5336ec71b6fee396a95bb...

* Designed for CLI, it makes it easy and even pushes you to express your program as a single pipeline. You rarely need variables, functions or any control structure. And pipelines are great to build iteratively, debug and compose (see https://jqplay.org, https://jqterm.com)

* Core language is small but powerful with features like slicing, destructuring, complex assignments and error handling. And you are already an expert in it's (immutable) data structures – it is just JSON

* Batteries included in the stdlib – regex, path operations, C math/dates, algorithms. Modules are supported, but I did not need any dependencies for solving Advent of Code.

* jq is ubiquitous. Often pre-installed, tiny binary, no dependencies, basically single version (ok, awk is better – anything else?)

Being a go-to tool for JSON is sort of a double-edged sword – people just don't look past that. But nowadays JSON is the format for data, everything is convertible to it. And you can feed plain text into jq using --raw-input flag. i.e.:

    jq -nR '[inputs]' /etc/hosts

Jq (sed for JSON files)

Jq: https://stedolan.github.io/jq/ (for quick json extraction)

Supports producing structured JSON and CSV output (to use with jq or similar tools). I was inspired by nushell.

I think it has been turing complete for a long while. Here is the first prototype in haskell before it was convert to C https://github.com/stedolan/jq/commit/eca89acee00faf6e9ef55d..., it's very basic but i would guess it has enough things to be turing complete.

If you have jq installed you can run gallery-dl https://twitter.com/YOUR HANDLE/following --dump-json | jq ".[][2].legacy.screen_name|""https://twitter.com/""""+." -r to get a list of everyone you follow

https://github.com/nginx-proxy/acme-companion https://github.com/nginx-proxy/docker-gen https://github.com/projectdiscovery/dnsx https://github.com/projectdiscovery/httpx https://github.com/projectdiscovery/mapcidr https://github.com/debauchee/barrier https://github.com/stedolan/jq https://github.com/ddosify/ddosify https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kind https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized https://github.com/motiv-labs/janus

> What DSLs might someone make today?

Oh, but there are SO many!

These two super-categories I am very fond of:

- Query languages

- Infrastructure specification languages

Here are some concrete examples:

GraphQL: An API query language: https://graphql.org/

jq: A JSON command-line processor: https://stedolan.github.io/jq/

HCL: A DSL for expressing Terraform assets: https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/cdktf/concepts/hcl...

Troll: A DSL for expressing dice roll simulations: http://hjemmesider.diku.dk/~torbenm/Troll/

fvg: Functional Vector Graphics: https://github.com/lemmih/fvg

Kleenex: Optimal regex-based stream processor: https://kleenexlang.org/

Futhark: High-performance purely functional data-parallel array programming: https://futhark-lang.org/

> And when should they be libraries instead?

A friend recently told me that DSLs (stand-alone) and eDSLs (embedded in an existing language) have the main difference that DSLs are overgrown configuration files, and eDSLs are overgrown libraries.

I'd say: When you want to call your DSL from more than one programming environment, it is good to have an abstract representation that transcends one particular syntax-tree definition. A library is good until then.