If you don’t want to commit to the idiosyncrasies of a specific shell running on a particular platform, try the Squirrel Shell. The Squirrel Shell provides an advanced, object-oriented scripting language that works equally well on UNIX, Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows systems. Write a script once, and run it anywhere.
but without the good stuff. Seriously, just another c-derived scripting language. Oh…
“Run it anywhere” where “anywhere” is “Machines that have squirrelsh installed” which sounds awfully like another way of saying “Run it almost nowhere”. How is this preferable to perl or bash, which at least have the advantage of being in the default installs of a large number of machines?
Exactly. If I had to install a third party interpreter across a heterogeneous *nix and Windows environment, I’d just go with Python –or Perl if I really had to. If it were all *nix systems, I’d just stick with the holy trinity: sh, sed, awk.
Personnaly I’ll choose perl, because it stays true to it’s root as a glue scripting language, and not a language that tries to do everything (but that’s like speaking about choosing between orange and banana, or hammers and screwdrivers each one has its purpose and should be used when needed).
I know what you mean – the runtime might be portable, but unless machines actually have it installed, the language itself is no more portable than the 1100lb lump of stone depicted in the article.
I think the argument the author is trying to make is that the syntax is better than bash or perl. I’m not sure that’s a good enough reason to switch to it as its still an obscure language. Python or even PHP might be a better way to go, if your looking for something other than perl/bash. Ruby is mentioned in the article, but its not my cup of tea.