#Perl scripting language windows#

A defining moment for me was watching a video of an interview with Jeffrey Snover (PowerShell's lead designer), when the interviewer asked him how big of a program one could write with PowerShell and Snover answered without missing a beat: '80 characters.' At that moment I realized that this is finally a guy at Microsoft who 'gets' shell programming (probably related to the fact that PowerShell was neither developed by Microsoft's programming language group (i.e. PowerShell cares about scripting first, large programs second. Python cares about large programs first, scripting second. They address problem 1 and 3 from above, by basically making the opposite choice compared to Python. PowerShell was basically created by ignoring everything Microsoft has ever done ( COMMAND.COM, CMD.EXE, VBScript, JScript) and instead starting from the Unix shell, then removing all backwards-compatibility cruft (like backticks for command substitution) and massaging it a bit to make it more Windows-friendly (like using the now unused backtick as an escape character instead of the backslash which is the path component separator character in Windows).

#Perl scripting language windows#

It's still the 'command prompt' that has been around since, what? Windows 3.0?) I mean, COMMAND.COM? Really? (Unfortunately, they still have a crappy terminal. There is RuSH (Ruby shell), which tries to implement a shell in Ruby, there is rush, which is an internal DSL for shell programming in Ruby, there is Hotwire, which is a Python shell, but IMO none of those come even close to competing with Bash, Zsh, fish and friends.ДЄctually, IMHO, the best current shell is Microsoft PowerShell, which is very surprising considering that for several decades now, Microsoft has continually had the worst shells evar. At least, I have yet to see a convincing implementation of it. I have the feeling that trying to address these points by bolting features or DSLs onto a general-purpose programming language doesn't work. In the general-purpose programming world, dataflow seems to be mostly viewed as a concurrency model, not so much as a programming paradigm. Nobody realizes that, not even the people who write shells, but it turns out that shells are quite good at that, and general-purpose languages not so much. Shell programming is basically dataflow programming. In Bash & Co., files, directories, file descriptors, processes are all first-class objects, in Python, only Python objects are first-class, if you want to manipulate files, directories etc., you have to wrap them in a Python object first. are designed to scale down to 10 character programs. are designed to scale up to 10000, 100000, maybe even 1000000 line programs, Bash & Co. They are, however, not statically typed, which means they need to have different literals for those, in order to keep them apart. are strongly typed, which means that the number 123, the string 123 and the file 123 are quite different. IOW: Python is designed to be good both at scripting and non-scripting, Bash cares only about scripting.Д«ash & Co. are designed to be only good at scripting, with absolutely no compromise. There are a couple of differences that I can think of just thoughtstreaming here, in no particular order: An alternative expression for the question would be:Д¬an a programming language that is suitable for design of complex systems be at the same time able to express useful one-liners that can access the file system or control jobs? Can a programming language usefully scale up as well as scale down? So the comparison is not about the characteristics of various interactive ( REPL) environments such as history and command line substitution. I am asking about the features of the shell language versus that of scripting languages. If you know of such a language, please post it as well.ДЄs S.Lott explains, the question needs some clarification. The reason of this question is that I am hoping to develop a language usable in both.

I have tried to articulate the reason, but I am unable to, aside from assuming that the treatment of strings differently in both has something to do with it. I use Python as the language I am most familiar with. I think most will agree with me that a large portion of medium to large scale programming is easier in Python than in Bash.

It feels for me much smoother to use bash for example than to use the shell profile in IPython, despite reports to the contrary. When using the command line, the shell languages seem to be much easier. What are the differences between shell languages like Bash ( bash), Z shell ( zsh), Fish ( fish) and the scripting languages above that makes them more suitable for the shell?