• chubot 9 hours ago

    FWIW there are several Haskell and OCaml shell projects on this wiki page, which is editable:

    Internal DSLs for Shell - https://github.com/oils-for-unix/oils/wiki/Internal-DSLs-for...

    and ones in many other languages like Scheme and Lisp

    e.g.

    https://github.com/jgoerzen/hsh/wiki

    https://github.com/luke-clifton/shh/tree/master/shh

    And also a page of alternative shells:

    https://github.com/oils-for-unix/oils/wiki/Alternative-Shell...

  • simonmic 18 hours ago

    As a haskeller, and shell scripter, I find this a refreshing and exciting experiment. Much of the goodness of haskell, but with a much tighter focus and smaller scope. No imports, language pragmas, packages or build tools needed; all of the building blocks listed on one short page, https://chrisdone.github.io/hell/api. More platform independent, robust, and regular than shell. Potentially a nice learning language / stepping stone to haskell itself.

    It's quite verbose right now, and I don't see much networking API yet, but it's just starting. I could see it easily growing into something very nice.

    • bubblyworld 3 hours ago

      For those like me who want to see actual examples of Hell scripts: https://chrisdone.github.io/hell/examples/

      • metadat 15 hours ago

        Why are there no examples with "#!/usr/bin/env ghc" at the top?

        It's not a shell script without the Linux incantation stanza.. for reals. How are you going to get started without the proper boiler plate?

        • whateveracct 13 hours ago

          It's "#!/usr/bin/env hell" - this isn't ghc. See https://chrisdone.com/posts/hell/

          This seems to be a deep tour of the implementation as much as the language. So it's not supposed to be a first principles talk. That's fine. It's not all for everybody.

          • hi-v-rocknroll 13 hours ago

                #!/usr/bin/env runhaskell
            
            ^ Works just fine. No need to reinvent what already exists and blog throwing shade on an inability to learn shell scripting.
          • chongli 20 hours ago

            Interesting but not a great piece for anyone not into functional language design. A pretty deep dive into the "how" while completely ignoring the "why."

            • rwmj 19 hours ago

              Or indeed the "what". Did he ever show an example of what the shell scripts look like? I couldn't see it.

              • simonmic 18 hours ago

                The first link takes you to the home page, which links to examples; probably a better starting point.

                https://chrisdone.github.io/hell

                • rwmj 8 hours ago

                  If you're giving a presentation, you should start by telling the audience what it is you're talking about. Someone in the audience won't have a clue, and usually most of the audience have no clue.

              • tmoertel 19 hours ago

                Chris discusses the rationale in his blog post at https://chrisdone.com/posts/hell/

                • chongli 18 hours ago

                  Thanks for this! I read that but I'm still not convinced. Quote:

                  They lean far too heavily on sub processes to do basic things.

                  I thought this was the whole point of a unix scripting language! Most of the scripts I'm writing are not interactive REPLs or string-parsers, they're glue code for batch-invoking commands on files. Stuff like converting a bunch of FLAC files into MP3 with lame or avi video files into mkv with ffmpeg.

                  What bash offers me is very terse command invocation and powerful filename globbing, including regexp substitution. Scripts like this are generally not intended to be used more than once or twice, and so a type system like Haskell provides is irrelevant here. If you're writing something that's going to be iterated on and maintained for years then you're writing an application, not a script.

                  • thesz 9 hours ago

                    Let me introduce to you Kaldi, a speech-to-text engine. I put the link right into models directory, to save you some time.

                    https://github.com/kaldi-asr/kaldi/tree/master/egs

                    There are a bunch of shell, Perl and Python scripts there, with some awk in between. These scripts are often copied almost verbatim between models and this, believe me, can lead to all sorts of errors.

                    The running joke around working with these scripts was "all these .sh should be .hs," i.e., these scripts should be implemented in Haskell.

                    • 082349872349872 8 hours ago

                      > generally not intended to be used more than once or twice

                      on that note: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41489436

                • jonotime 20 hours ago

                  How was this page generated? I have a marp presentation (https://github.com/jonocodes/awesome-keyboards) that I would like to have shown on a single page like this with the notes expanded.

                  • cryptonector 20 hours ago

                    I really like this page, with slides on the left and blog on the right.

                  • scythmic_waves 12 hours ago

                    I bet reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/ would like this.

                    • pvsnp 21 hours ago

                      I've wanted many things from shell but never to write Haskell in Shell. This turned something relatively naturally expressible into something so complex that requires type theory

                      • sinkasapa 21 hours ago

                        There is no reason why one has to enjoy a haskell-like syntax over Bourne shell syntax but I think you're wrong about the tool. The author states that "It should have no abstraction capabilities (classes, data types, polymorphic functions, etc.)." Granted, there may be types but without those abstractions, I don't think you need to know much of anything about type theory.

                        • eru 14 hours ago

                          You could use the Scheme Shell instead, if you don't like static typing.

                          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scsh

                          And specifically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scsh#%22Acknowledgments%22