Should I teach bash, fish, or Nushell to data scientists who want to go beyond the basics of shell scripting? There seems to be a clear spectrum from "ubiquitous but m'gawd" to "this is the future but m'gawd in a different way".
@gvwilson I’d also recommend teaching Bash but otherwise I would lean heavily towards zsh: still POSIX sh compatible but a lot saner than Bash. And it is the default shell on macOS, and very widely available beyond that, and comes with extensive documentation.
@dpprdan@gvwilson I 2nd Bash; it's widely used and supported basically everywhere.
Anyone writing a Bash script should know about and use https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck - it's an incredible tool and you learn lots of Bash from just using it - removes endless trial'n'error guessing that otherwise sticks around for years
@gvwilson I'm a fish user, and love it, but not sure if would push it as default, for what they need to do, wouldn't python be a better fit? Any script longer than 5 lines sound be in a better language than bag IMHO.
@gvwilson Nushell for the structured data. People who want to go beyond the basics don't want to be dealing with basic problems over and over again on the way there.
@mhoye yeah, I'm having fun playing with it myself, but there are a lot of rough edges and I don't know if it's fair to inflict those on people for whom these tools are a means to an end. On the other hand, bash...
@mhoye I strongly agree, and maybe my struggle to switch over personally is a case of "my hands have been typing bash for decades", but I'm also trying to be mindful of "if you ask the person next to you for help, will they be able to?"
@gvwilson I feel as though showing students that learning new and better tools rather than sticking with the rusty ones you're familiar with even if you have to admit ignorance and learn together, in front of the class, has at least three valuable lessons in it that are significantly more important than the tool itself.
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