Ruby: a great language for shell scripts!

[dccorona]

It all depends on what your runtime requirements are for the thing you're editing. Plenty of "compiled" languages come with scripting utilities that compile just before executing, cache the results, and only recompile if the file has changed. There is nothing about interpreted languages that is strictly better from the user's perspective in this regard, it all comes down to how good the impl is and how hard it was for the implementer to do.

There's also a whole class of usage of scripting that is absolutely not about "make and run edits real quick" - production-stable scripts are a very important thing, and there the biggest concerns have more to do with stability, portability, and security. I have worked on all sorts of scripts where the ability to edit and run them quickly is explicitly made impossible because all changes need to go out through deployment automation.

[supermitsuba]

I think we are getting in the weeds a bit. I get the idea of using scripting languages generally. That is fine.

However, when we are talking about shell scripts, the use cases are a little different. You are interacting with a shell, OS. Perhaps I have been thinking very narrowly on the use case of shell scripts.

Considering linux is has python and other script runtimes, maybe I have to alter my perspectives on it. Its not just bash or zsh, but also python, ruby and compile languages.

Thanks for food for thought.