this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
90 points (91.7% liked)

Programming

17658 readers
91 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]



founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
top 22 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 39 points 7 months ago

Whoa Black Betty, Amber-Lang.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 26 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I think it's to make it easier to write bash scripts, for those who are new or when the script is doing a more critical task

Modern Syntax

You will find many of the language features familiar, allowing you to get up and running much faster than if you were learning Bash from scratch.

Runtime Safety

It’s one of the key components missing from regular shell scripts. It can help you catch many bugs at compile time.

Type Safety

Amber ensures that you handle everything that could fail. Each Bash command and function that could fail must be handled in some way.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago

Ok, I guess that makes sense. Bash is a pretty old school language for those raised in the functional programming era

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

So if you're already pretty good at bash would you bother to switch and learn this?

[–] [email protected] 30 points 7 months ago

Never heard of this language, but you'd be surprised how hard it is to write a correct and portable shell script.

Personally, I'd break out python once the script gets larger than a few lines, or rust if I want something more proper.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 7 months ago

So basically the TypeScript of bash.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I love the concept. I hate many of the language design choices.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] towerful 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

For me, after looking over the docs, it's close enough to JavaScript that it might as well adopt more of the syntax (for example, conditionals and loops don't use parenthesis). It also has some similarities to python, but again not enough to be python.

Feels like an in-between language that has enough similarities to seem easy, but some gotchas that will regularly catch you out.
And then some extra features like the if chaining, which doesn't have the keyword if or switch in it. So you have to know that that structure implies an if or switch conditional.

Especially for something like bash scripting, which devs probably don't spend as much time doing compared to python or js. So, it would probably take them longer (and break their brain more) than just scripting it in python/js directly or dealing with bash directly.

It's an improvement over bash, and it's nice that it transpiles to bash.
I might have to play around with it and see how it actually feels to use

[–] DeprecatedCompatV2 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I found the if-blocks more concerning than the lack of parentheses. Although I would've preferred parentheses for better parity with Kotlin for the if-else blocks (instead of then).

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Don't like it one bit

If bash is hard to program, get away with it, not build atop of it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] -2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

okay but the author has to write it, why not write something useful open source?

[–] furikuri 3 points 7 months ago

For fun or to play around with transpilers?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

We need a way to watch for replies to comments without commenting ourselves... (not an answer to your question, sorry)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I mean, my comment isn't really meaningful either so, touche, Internet stranger.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

No, I meant I was following your comment, as I am interested in the answer to your question.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Was posted a few hours before and has many comments: https://beehaw.org/post/13943043

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

When JavaScript developer starts writing a Linux script.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

I mean if you want a shell language that behaves more like a regular programming language, PowerShell core is a thing.