nushell VS oil

Most of the time I'm in Powershell which, thanks to Powershell Core, is now cross-platform and incredibly powerful. But I'm finding myself also using Nu more and more. In both shells I also use the Databricks CLI a lot. Want to check the status of jobs? Use the CLI. Want to upload and download data? Use the CLI. And so on.

There are also some new shells in the list, including Tabbyand Nushell, which both had around 7K stars, though Nushell is a much newer project

I'd recommend to take a look at https://www.nushell.sh/ which has structured output, but displays it neatly when printing to the terminal.

I'm surprised to see no mention of nushell [0] I've tried it a while ago and seemed really promising

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

Has anyone tried out Nushell recently? I've been playing with it for the last few days, and it's shaping up into something pretty impressive for data/pipeline handling.

But no, people should use pipes in Nushell, of course! ;-P

Might want to add something about why someone would want this over something like say NuShell. Only thing I'm seeing right now seems to be the Lua thing.. which is kind of irrelevant to me anyway. Thanks.

You might find this interesting

There's also Nushell, which I've never used, which is similar to Powershell in that commands return structured data rather than text, but I believe has a more functional-inspired approach, rather than object-oriented.

I would divide the implementation side into POSIX compatible shells and alternative shells.

Oil shell aims to do just that! It's fully backwards compatible with bash, then adds a bunch more opt-in features to make a better language. I've used it a bit so far.

Great post! I just dug up this informative comment by @svat from 3 years ago on the Pascal to C conversion, for anyone who's interested:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16526151

Today, major TeX distributions have their own Pascal(WEB)-to-C converters, written specifically for the TeX (and METAFONT) program. For example, TeX Live uses web2c[5], MiKTeX uses its own “C4P”[6], and even the more obscure distributions like KerTeX[7] have their own WEB/Pascal-to-C translators. One interesting project is web2w[8,9], which translates the TeX program from WEB (the Pascal-based literate programming system) to CWEB (the C-based literate programming system).

The only exception I'm aware of (that does not translate WEB or Pascal to C) is the TeX-GPC distribution [10,11,12], which makes only the changes needed to get the TeX program running with a modern Pascal compiler (GPC, GNU Pascal).

...

I may write a blog post on this since it's relevant to how https://www.oilshell.org/ is written in a set of Python-based DSLs and translated to C++.

I added this to

https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/The-Biggest-Shell-Progr...

although there are a lot of whitespace and comments to get up to ~3800 lines.

The biggest shell scripts in the world seem to be about 10x bigger, around ~30K lines. Feel free to add any "program" that's more than 10K lines, and smaller ones if they are "interesting". (That's subjective, but I think a Forth qualifies.)

Also, I absolutely agree, I've long had the exact same thoughts about shell programming. It strikes me as incredibly antique. I was planning to write my own shell language for a while, as a kind of 'second generation' approach to the shell, but I stopped when I saw that there were already some really cool projects out there like Oil shell (difficult to Google for obvious reasons) and NGS.

(author here) Thanks for nicely summarizing the project!

I didn't know about fftw, but another nice analogy is TeX! TeX is actually written in WEB / a subset of Pascal (H-Pascal I think), and then translated to C. This came up a few times on Hacker News and I got some interesting info.

I wrote yesterday in this comment that I want to hire a "compiler engineer" to help with the C++ translation:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29605304

It is already half done, passing ~1100 of 1950 spec tests, so I believe it's very feasible. But it needs someone who can concentrate on it full time.

I might as well post the draft of the "job listing" to get people thinking about this. I think the challenge is finding the right person rather than funding it (I'm applying for funding now)

https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Compiler-Engineer-Job

One sentence description: write an ~10K line translator for statically typed Python, and a ~5K line C++ runtime, and get a free shell out of it! (over 5 years of painstaking work on the semantics!)

The input is ~36K lines of Python the output is ~100K lines of C++. This is a very doable project for an experienced compiler engineer. :)

So somehow this paper misses one of the greatest developments in this area, oil https://www.oilshell.org/ - which:

1. has a compatibility mode with sh and bash. it's the only new shell I know with a upgrade path from bash [0]

2. otherwise fixes tons of unix shell misfeatures and in particular fixes quoting hell

PS: one fun quirk of the oil implementation is that it's written in Python.. but actually in a DSL that generates statically typed C++ code, ditching the Python runtime altogether [3] - when you do compile Oil, you just get a C++ tarball (somewhat like fftw, a FFT package written in OCaml but which first generates C code; fftw developers write OCaml, but fftw users compile C)

[0] https://www.oilshell.org/why.html

[1] https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/01/simplest-explanation.h...

[2] https://www.oilshell.org/release/latest/doc/idioms.html

[3] https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/01/why-a-new-shell.html#w...