Tiny Tools

A couple years ago I wrote about what I want in a programming language. I then decided to try OCaml even though it was missing a few important points in my list of requirements for a “dream language.” I never took OCaml much farther than an over-engineered Hello World test run, though I did generally enjoy the experience.

I was looking for a good load-bearing language – something that scales well, makes a large codebase easy and enjoyable to maintain, and which you could use to build big tools or systems with. In hindsight, I should have been looking for a language that makes it easy and fun to create tiny tools. Since I have a small child and other priorities, I don’t have too much time or energy to build big things, and I’m ok with that.

Which is why since then I have mostly been enjoying Bash and Nushell.

Nushell

I don’t recommend Nushell as your day-to-day interactive shell (yet). But writing small scripts in Nushell is insanely fun. I like the syntax, type safety, functional style. I like the polish around displaying things, parameter parsing, help messages, and JSON parsing. I like how it encourages you to create a sort of well-defined data flow and transformation pipeline in your scripts.

It makes me happy.

But I really only use it for personal scripts, because it hasn’t reached a stable 1.0 yet and not many people have it installed. I’ve also had trouble using it seriously with programs like fzf, which I also love.

So for everything else, there’s…

Bash? srsly?

I never thought I would say this, but Bash is actually really fun. I’ve gotten quite good at it. Don’t get me wrong: It is a terrible, horrible, no-good language for a lot of use cases. But it is still incredibly good at gluing bigger programs together in interesting ways with very few lines of code.

It’s also shippable – I can publish Bash scripts with an open source license, and other people might actually benefit from them. I’ve developed a certain style in writing Bash that makes the code surprisingly bearable to read, more robust, and avoids a lot of common landmines.

In other words, Bash allows me to leverage other people’s hard work with load-bearing languages to solve my own problems using just a few lines of code.

I’ll write more

I’m trying to keep these posts short, and my son is starting to wake up. I’m gonna go hang out with him. Perhaps later I’ll write a followup post about some of my Bash projects (which are mostly published on GitHub) and some of the tools I find to be indispensable for making nice CLIs and TUIs.

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