As I see periodic features requests for Bash in this list. They most
often misses some background plan or justification beyond QOL
improvement for script coder, so they can have same feature as with
other language.
I always thought that Bash DNA was tied to orchestrating actions from
commands forming a shell around a Unix kernel, with characters streams
forming the data backbone for Bash to interact with system commands.
The strength of Bash is that it is exactly fit as a shell, and it has
enough POSIX and even Bash versions available in a wide variety of
systems environments ; so that if you write Bash scripts avoiding
cutting-edge features, or limit yourself to features with a decade old
maturity, you can expect mostly flawless compatibility.
Then I have concerns about all the requests for implementing new
features, especially those features that would turn Bash into an
all-purpose programming language, loosing grounds with its designed role
in Unix systems.
I'd like to see more mid-term or long term plans to keep Bash relevant
ten years from now, with systems evolving more with event-driven
operations; processes exchanging more structured data streams such as
JSON or XML. Bash can barely deal with these format with external
parsers, but then struggle to work with the data because it has no
built-in internal hierarchical structures for it.
I remember Chet mention future modules to deal with various formats, and
it feels like a sound approach to deal with these structured data
formats, but still Bash will struggle to use these with only arrays and
associative arrays.
I also wonder if it is even realistic to get Bash evolving to keep-up
with more modern data structures and formats, when other scripting
languages like Python are increasingly occupying the place of shell
scripts. I can see how Perl lost grounds while it gained features but
loosing relevance.
What is on Bash's roadmap for the next ten or twenty years for it to
remain a relevant tool, or is it going to maintain status-quo as a
fall-back scripting tool you expect being on every systems, even older
and no longer supported ones?
--
Léa Gris
