Your argument is down to the weights.

There are other communities where movement in the language came from outside tooling that built extensions on top of the language, such as Sass or TypeScript.

How many places do you have Bash, but not AWK?

bash bashing i can understand. whats wrong with ts tho?

Bash is great for orchestrating other Unix tools into an automated workflow. Only when that workflow requires stuff that Bash doesn't have is it time to break out Python. Integrate Shellcheck into your editor, and you get automated help for writing more reliable Bash.

bash scripting has ergonomics?

It always comes to be a social problem. Sort of. I want to use X instead of Y, but maybe everyone does not want the same, or adaption of X is harder in technology wise. So I use wrapper Z that compiles to Y, and avoid some problems, but bring new problems. Maybe these problems are smaller ones than just keeping to use Y directly.

If you don't want to use it, don't use it

Exactly

  #!/usr/bin/tcc -run
  
  #include <stdio.h>
  
  int main(int argc, char **argv)
  {
      printf("Hello from C!\n");
  
      for (int i = 1; i < argc; ++i)
          printf("argument %d: %s\n", i, argv[i]);
  
      return 0;
  }

And ready is your cscript :)

  $ chmod u+x cscript && ./cscript hello world
  Hello from C!
  argument 1: hello
  argument 2: world

(I can't even articulate why I love it so much that this works)

bash is really painful to use for anything beyond the most rudimentary logic. Bourne and Mashey were terrible language designers. (By contrast, Thompson's V6 shell is very elegant, if limited.)

That said, this should just be a shell itself and not something that generates into other shell dialects. Otherwise, why not use Ruby or something like it that has actual expressive power?

We're missing AI that doesn't still its hand held every step of the way.

Can you change the current working directory? If not, it's not a shell script.

> That said, this should just be a shell itself and not something that generates into other shell dialects. Otherwise, why not use Ruby or something like it that has actual expressive power?

I'm guessing the advantage here would be that the compiled "bytecode" (the resulting bash) can be distributed to systems that would then not need to have Amber installed. (And vs. a real binary from, e.g., Go/Rust/etc., it isn't tied to the platform, either.)

Vs. a Ruby script would require Ruby as a run-time dependency; Amber here is effectively a compile-time dependency.

Python 3 is available basically everywhere these days though, so I think there's still a lot of merit to just using a higher level language like you suggest. Even Ruby, while not available out of the box, is not exactly hard to get on most OSes.

Obviously it's not a shell script, it's still C. It's fun though and being able to freely specify an interpreter/execution path using a shebang has led me to write some useful little command line utilities in unlikely programming languages over the years. That said, not sure why changing the working directory would be the litmus test. A C program can change its own working directory just as easily as an ordinarily executed bash script?

  $ cat bscript.sh && echo "---" && ./bscript.sh 
    #!/usr/bin/bash
    cd testdir/
    ls
    ---
    dummyfile

in C you can change dir easily via `chdir()`[1]

  $ cat cscript && echo "---" && ./cscript 
    #!/usr/bin/tcc -run
    
    #include <stdio.h>
    #include <stdlib.h>
    #include <unistd.h>
    
    int main(void)
    {
        if (chdir("testdir") == -1) {
            perror("chdir");
            return EXIT_FAILURE;
        }
    
        execlp("ls", "ls", (char *)NULL);
        perror("execlp");
        return EXIT_FAILURE;
    }
    ---
    dummyfile

[1] https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/chdir.2.html

If you meant somehow changing the parent shell's directory a bash script doesn't do that either

Presumably you can call chdir(2) from the C code?

Or did you mean change the directory of the calling shell (in which case, executable shell scripts written in Bash and friends can’t do that either).