What was the point of [ “x$var” = “xval” ]?

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • murex

    A smarter shell and scripting environment with advanced features designed for usability, safety and productivity (eg smarter DevOps tooling)

    `if` and iterations were two things that annoyed me about bash enough to write my own $SHELL. It's not a transpiler though so I can't realistically use it for production services. However for quickly hacking stuff together for testing / personal use it's been a life saver due to having the same prototyping speed of bash but without the painful edge cases.

    Not suggesting it's suitable for everyone though. But it's certainly solved a lot of problems for me.

    https://github.com/lmorg/murex

  • oil

    Oils is our upgrade path from bash to a better language and runtime. It's also for Python and JavaScript users who avoid shell!

    Bash is ugly and rife with pitfalls, but it can be incredibly productive for certain classes of problems if you know what you’re doing. Trying to use Python or Go to whack some external commands together feels very cumbersome to me.

    For pure programming, “real” languages are absolulely preferable in almost every way, but all of them fail when it comes to running external programs and redirecting their output in a way that doesn’t make me pull my hair out. As a heavy user of both “real” programming languages and shell scripting languages, I’m left craving something that brings the best of both worlds.

    There are a number of newer shell projects in this vein that are very exciting, like Oil [0], Elvish [1], and Xonsh [2]. I was also hopeful that Neugram [3] would go somewhere, but the project seems to have died out. While many people cite Bash’s lack of portability as a reason not to use it, I find Bash to be very portable for my use cases and avoid using these newer shells for their lack of portability. Maybe one day we can have nice things.

    [0]: https://github.com/oilshell/oil

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  • github-keygen

    Easy creation of secure SSH configuration for your GitHub account(s)

  • nushell

    A new type of shell

  • Delegator.py

    Subprocesses for Humans 2.0.

    Huh? That's only true if you don't use any libraries, right?

    What if you want to use something like delegator[0] to make running shell commands less toilsome?

    [0] https://github.com/amitt001/delegator.py

  • elvish

    Powerful scripting language & Versatile interactive shell

  • xonsh

    :shell: Python-powered, cross-platform, Unix-gazing shell.

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  • ng

    scripting language integrated with Go

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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