Home

Leadup: syntactic puns. List a bunch of examples.
Recap:
- shell the good parts.
- Shell the bad parts (everyone agreed on this.)
There is no more room to add features to shell: bash 4.4. The Literal Anti-Pattern.
Why add tables to Oil? Because the output of "ls" and "ps" are both tables.
Why add ADTs to Oil? Because we want to actually parse things rather than relying on regexes and macro processing. Sometimes that approach is good enough, but sometimes it isn't.
- Related: Oil and the R Language

Why Awk? Because once you add hash tables and regexes to shell, which bash/zsh have already done, then it's almost an Awk already. The only difference is the implicit outer loop of awk (for each file, for each line, for each field).
Why Make? Because 90% of the lines in a Makefile are either variable assignments or literal shell.

Programming Patterns

Interesting facts about other language implementations:
- Clang AST, TypeScript external visitors with "switch", TableGen language in LLVM, sh/awk/C code gen in most shells.
Breaking abstractions -- the git log | python pipeline is like the Go-style of unicode handling with utf-8. You don't always have to parse, operate, serialize. Sometimes you can just massage the input.
Remote evaluation. ssh user@host find -type f -a -executable sends an expression over the wire, just like SQL does. Or sh, awk, etc.