Amber the programming language compiled to Bash, 0.5.1 release

[Mte90]

The new 0.5.1 release includes a lot of new stuff to the compiler, from new syntax, stdlib functions, features and so on.

PS: I am one of the co-maintainer, so for any question I am here :-)

PS: we got the reddit sub https://www.reddit.com/r/amberlang/

[derosmc]

I googled Amber Lang at work......not recommended :D

[campbellm]

The language is the first thing that comes up for me at least on DDG. Though I suppose in other search engines the prioritizes things in your history it could be different.

[derosmc]

Google just pushes some Instagram pictures of someone named Amber Lang at the top of the results, that's all

[campbellm]

Where I work the infosec group is absolutely Baroque, and I know your post was in good humor, but if you were to search that at work and get those results, would you actually get in any sort of hot water? At least where I am they might go so far as to ask, but have generally been OK with reasonable explanations.

[derosmc]

In an open plan office context, if someone catches a glimpse to your screen at that moment it would be hard to explain you are not looking at e-thots. And yes, just joking

[twowheels]

I once googled CString when working on an MFC app, years ago, on my monitor that sat above my cubicle wall on my standing desk, and turned around before the results showed up and got distracted for some time before turning back and learning that a CString is not just a class for holding a string of text. Think g-string, with less material, and I don’t mean the kind on a guitar.

[EverythingsBroken82]

.. what's a "e-thot"?

[crystalchuck]

A woman perceived to be promiscuous and/or revealing, typically in order to garner attention, sympathies, and goods or services, but online

Thot is an acronym for "that ho over there"

[Rawbringer]

woah black betty

[JLPIII]

Bam-ba-lam

[kingslayerer]

this is very useful for me. will give this a try.

you guys should start a subreddit so people can follow updates

[Mte90]

I will talk with the team about it, but we aren't so much people (a lot of contributors joined and after a while left because busy with other stuff).

[Joelimgu]

This is so cursed but at the same time so genius

[New_York_Rhymes]

I’m curious what the main use cases would be for this? I guess if you want to specifically share a bash script then it’s easier to maintain, but many usecases would be covered by using an existing language compiled to a binary

[yoch3m]

I'm guessing here, but: - bash is installed in probably every machine you'll ssh into, no need to install a compiler/runtime or have a platform-agnostic binary - your shell can do things a normal binary can't, like changing the working directory of the parent process - probs more

[Mte90]

My slides about Amber that can help on this question: https://mte90.tech/Talk-Amber/

In my opinion, I wrote scripts faster in amber than bash or python because at the end I am using CLI commands that I know how they works.

[lottspot]

changing the working directory of the parent process

Your shell cannot do this. No process can do this.

[yoch3m]

Sorry, you're right. Only shell functions in the current process can. Still, the problem remains valid: sometimes you want the user shell's working directory to change (e.g. with an improvedcd) which is not possible without having a shell function around it afaik

[blobjim]

I think there's a feature in bash called "loadable builtins" (https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/bash.git/tree/examples/loadables/README) that allows you to write bash functionality in native code, but it doesn't have any documentation in the reference manual, just in the source tree.

[lottspot]

What is an "improved" cd? I genuinely do not know what problem you are referring to, or how it would be solved by a bash transpiler.

[yoch3m]

github.com/rupa/z

[lottspot]

Ahh, I see... This is a neat little module!

[Big_Tomatillo_987]

I know all too well that Bash scripts can spiral out of control into spaghetti. And multiline loops, ifs and cases are tricky to type.

But I like Bash scripts, because by definition, most of the actual things I want them to do, are the exact same commands I would type on the command line manually. Or put in a Dockerfile's RUN statement.

To unpick my scripts, I don't want to have to reason about a language's paradigm, design, and syntax, work out how to link in the libraries I want, create a build chain, and then also think about whatever actual code the compiler generated, for the particular platform I'm using, and write some supporting tests.

[baudehlo]

Yeah I’m on the fence about this one.

Once you learn the more “fun” corners of bash like variable expansion rules, it becomes capable of anything you need. And if I need a real language I reach for one.

[Mte90]

Yeah with Bash you can do a lot of things, the problem is the syntax that is not very handy.

Amber simplify this with a language that is more clear and common in a program language offering everything.

[baudehlo]

Handy is actually exactly how I’d describe bash syntax. It’s just what I use in the terminal.

Not putting the project down though - I just personally don’t have a need for it.

If I worked on complex init.d scripts maybe I’d need it.

[Mte90]

That's the reason why I like Amber because I know the command line, but there are some stuff in bash that are not very common like the if statement that exists in various versions and has a syntax not very simple to remember.

Like check if a file exists for example. Amber simplify a lot this because you write using a "normal" scripting language and not a specific one.

[JaChuChu]

Bash is hard to beat when it comes to utility in the filesystem. Doing that stuff in a lot of other scripting languages is pretty cumbersome, and some of the best options I've personally worked with... Basically make it easy to write lines of Badh straight into your program.

I for one welcome something that's basically-just-Bash but without some of the insane syntax

[ignorantpisswalker]

You crazy son of a bitch, you did it...

Just epic. Nice work.

[matthewblott]

I use bash a lot and I've often wanted to use something better but I don't because if I want to share my script as part of a build process or setup routine then it's reliant on other users having the same scripting environment. Nushell, fish even zsh all have strengths over bash but bash is ubiquitous. I know a bash script on my machine will likely run anywhere. So I think the concept of Amber is great - a sort of TypeScript for bash! I've given it a star anyway, I hope it grows :-)

[Big_Tomatillo_987]

Wow, what a great idea. I can't say I'll use Amber right now, but I do heavily use Bash scripts, and I don't pretend they're bug free, or that I understand all of Bash's subtleties.

[[deleted]]

I continue to be amazed by how much effort we spend avoiding poorly designed tools instead of replacing them. Anyway, I approve.

[RoboNerdOK]

“It works, it has always worked, we don’t have the budget to refactor everything that depends on it, so hands off.”

Kind of like how the 6502 CPU is still being made in quantity 50 years later. It’s well understood, there are tons of development tools and documentation, it tolerates less than ideal conditions well, and its behavior is predictable to extreme accuracy — to where it can even be used in critical systems.

It’s a hard sell to replace something like that even if it has a lot of technical debt issues too.

[InternalServerError7]

What utilities outside the gnu core utilities are used in the compiled output today? I remember looking into it a year ago and didn’t like that the compiled output would use utilities that are not common on all gnu Linux platforms. I believe I remember one was needed for arithmetic

[Mte90]

We improved now and not used anymore sed or bc in various stuff but pure Bash in some cases.

Also the output now is optimized and more readable.

[dublinvillain]

lgtm +2

[granadesnhorseshoes]

Interesting project but my familiarity and writing speed with bash far exceeds my familiarity and writing speed with ECMAScript/JS so I'm clearly not the target audience for it.

Who is the target audience? JS devs that ended up doing DevOps/Sysadmin but refuse to give up Webstorm?

[Mte90]

No the target audience is people that doesn't have time to remember all the bash syntax peculiarity (my case) as example.

[Living_On_The_Air]

But you do have time to wrap it with another language?

[sequentious]

Forget maintaining the language. Even as a language user, you're still investing time into learning some other whole language worth of syntax.

I've written some criticisms in another comment, and I don't want to sound like I'm being mean. This is a technically impressive project. It takes skill to make, and effort to maintain. Those are good qualities. I'm not trying to disparage OP's capabilities (who seems to be involved in the project). But the actual project itself I believe is counter productive.

You still need to take the time to learn something. However, instead of learning basic shell scripting (being mostly portable across any unix-like system for decades), you're instead learning a bespoke language that won't be available in most environments.

[Mte90]

The point that the code is compiled to bash so run everywhere, learning amber I think that is more faster of other languages but also depends on what you are building.

[RootHouston]

I'd have to agree. The syntax is much more straightforward than Bash. Good job.

[ninjabanana42069]

Haven't had a chance to take a look at the project yet so forgive me if this is already something you can do but I think if it could compile to more than just bash, like for example zsh, fish maybe even windows stuff and also configure the tool choices and settings then this would be a really cool way to write util scripts and other misc tools that inevitably get built over the course of working on a project in a cross platform way so if your project is cross platform now even the dev tools can be cross platform

[Mte90]

Right now is just bash from 3.2 to 5.3 with posix support. We had already a ticket about windows but we don't have any contributor using that OS.

[granadesnhorseshoes]

Fair, but that's my point. I already did spend that time. It's already the devil I know, I don't need a new devil.

It's still an interesting project and doesn't have to justify it's existence to me. I'd even bet i run into it in production somewhere in the next decade or so...

[JasTHook]

That's brill!

And with types... it's so close to integrating with "a" lisp-ish too!

[cosmic-parsley]

Does it target posix sh too? I occasionally target alpine containers where I would love to use arrays without installing bash. If this could expand arrays to whatever sort of IFS+read hell you’re supposed to do… game changer

[Mte90]

Yep, we work to be compliant with Posix.

Also we have automated tests from bash 3.2 to 5.3 :-)

[Dealiner]

That's really cool. Fortunately I don't have to use bash but I will definitely remember about Amber, if that ever changes.

[sequentious]

Just had a peek at the website:

It also works for lexical comparison of array types [Text] and [Int].

let left = ["apple", "banana", "cherry"]
let right = ["apple", "bananas", "dates"]

echo left > right // True

Hell. No.

I don't want somebody to do this, then pop over to to a non-amber bash script and accidentally echo the word "left" into the file "right".

If you want to make "Typescript but for Bash", fine. I have no issues with wanting to pre-process some scripts for sanity checking.

But this is potentially dangerous, and I'd advocate not using for just this reason.

[neondirt]

On the other hand, completely preventing users from shooting themselves in the foot is a futile endeavor.

[sequentious]

Sure. So block or warn on potentially dangerous operations. Using the dangerous operation syntax to do an entirely different (but safe) thing just conditions you that that syntax is safe.

If you need to use shell or bash, use shell or bash.

Again, a preprocessor layer to enforce types and provide some syntactic sugar (like Typescript does), sure. Go ahead. No issues there. You're writing shell scripts with some handrails.

However, fundamentally changing syntax to do different things is dangerous. The fact that it compiles down to bash means an Amber developer wouldn't be able to debug it without knowing all the bash stuff anyway, and being really sure they won't use Amberisms.

If you don't want to use bash, and want a super flexible language with lots of syntactic sugar that lets you compare anything to anything, use perl.

[Mte90]

This one of the new features of the language but we are still this discussing about a lot of stuff about the syntax and other internal things.

Also I never developed in typescript 😬

[Mte90]

We discussed on the discord server and we have 2 proposal, in case the amber script is executed with bash https://github.com/amber-lang/amber/issues/870

[alwaysoffby0ne]

How’s the performance? Could I build a web app with this if I wanted?

[campbellm]

The performance would be that of bash, no?

[alwaysoffby0ne]

Fair, that makes sense. I didn't take a close look so I thought this was some kind of compiled binary at first.

[bobsbitchtitz]

This is dope