What is the best alternative to DASH?

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score 9 · Answer 1

rc (shell)

Top Pro

Simple

rc is a very simple and easy to learn shell. See More

Top Con

Lacks return statement

rc has no return statement. See More

Top Pro

C-like syntax

rc has very C-like syntax, which is very helpful for people who are used to C-like programming languages and will find rc's syntax very enjoyable. For example: for (i in `{seq 1 100}) { echo $i } See More

Top Pro

Sane array handling

In rc $array expands to the whole array and if one of the elements of the array has spaces in it, it's still considered one single element after the array variable expansion. See More

9 0

score 140 · Answer 2

Bash (Bourne-Again SHell)

Top Pro

Default shell on most systems

Bash is the default shell on virtually every UNIX system. Making it very portable across different systems and once you get used to it, you can use it everywhere. See More

Top Con

Extremely complicated and inconsistent rules

In Bash, exceptions are the rule, not even all being described by the main page. There are a grand total of 5 different ways of quoting, sometimes even when one does not want to, for instance in command substitutions. These are all based around preserving the literal meaning of every character, with an exception list. There is even an exception list to the exception list in 4 of the 5, regarding how the backslash behaves! The behavior of the backslash is also one of the quoting rules, so naturally, it also has an exception in how it works when it stands before a newline as compared to other characters. Bash has several layers of interpretations, all to be kept in mind: The ~ expands to the home of the current user. So if you store it in a variable, can you use it that way? Nope: tilde expansion comes before variable expansion. Aha, so that's how it works! Then, since applying quotation happens after redirections are set up, it must mean that redirecting within quotes works, right? Nope: there is an exception! If a redirection symbol is not quoted, quotation around the symbol is observed, but is not removed. So, since variable expansion also comes after setting up redirections, and no exceptions are described here in the man page, getting the name of a file from a variable and using it as a target should not work, right? No: redirection does not actually take place when the symbols are being read, the symbols are merely removed and are noted for later, right before when the actual command runs. Apart from 5 types of quotation, there are basically 2 quoting phases, 2 word splitting phases (with only one being controllable), and a tokenization phase on top of that. If you have a command, it could be an alias, a special built in, a non-special built in, a symbolic link to a file, a regular file, a function, with different rules regarding how they can be overridden, if redirection happens before or after arguments have been passed (what does "time my_command 2>&1 >log_file" do?), etc. This list is admittedly long, but it doesn't even scratch the surface of the bloat, complexity and inconsistencies of Bash. See More

Top Pro

Plenty of examples and tutorials

Since this is very mature shell there is a lot of great examples and other resources describing how to do almost everything. See More

Top Con

GPL3 is not compatible with Apple's lawyers

Apple, one of the largest distributors of UNIX systems, only ships an ancient version of bash that predates the iPhone. No one knows why as Apple hasn't said, but the version Apple includes in MacOS is from right before the license was updated to version 3 of the GNU GPL (General Public License). Other major companies (IBM, Microsoft) have had no problem shipping the latest version of bash, so it's unclear what Apple's lawyers are averse to. The GPL has always said that if you distributed a program, you granted everyone the right to use it freely. The biggest change in version 3 was the addition, "...and that includes software patents." This was necessary because back in 2006 Microsoft was demanding that any company that uses Linux pay them or get sued for infringing on their patents. They even took some companies, like TomTom, to court. No software which can be restricted retroactively like that is truly free, so GPL 3+ includes a clause saying that if you distribute the program, then you are also granting license to any patents you own that are necessary to run it. What patents Apple has that bash could possibly infringe on is a mystery, but the bigger question is, Why does Apple even care? So what if they are granting people the right to run bash without being sued by Apple. It's not like they were planning on doing that, right? Even though it is not bash's fault that it is not Apple Lawyer-approved, this is a CON for it because a lot of people use Apple products. While there are methods like brew to install a current version of bash, Apple does not make it obvious to their customers what they are missing. See More

Top Pro

Rich scripting capabilities on a single line

Want to run something 5 times? Write a throw-away loop: for i in 1 2 3 4 5; do date; done If you need it 100 times? Not a problem: for i in {1..100}; do date; done or: for ((i=0; i<100; ++i)); do date; done How about emailing yourself when remote server is back online? Sure thing: while ! ping -c1 example.com &>/dev/null; do date; sleep 5; done && mailx -s 'server is back!' me@myself.com See More

Top Con

Compatibility can be a curse

One of bash's claims to fame is compatibility with previous versions of itself and historic shells. But, doing that means that new features are often written in tortured, awkward syntax that is not easy to learn. For example, bash uses the POSIX way of doing arithmetic: to add 5+3 you must put the numbers in double parentheses with a dollar sign at the start: x=$((5+3)). It is true that many shells suffer from this same CON, but since bash is such an important shell, it has less wiggleroom to ditch clunky ideas that might break existing scripts. See More

Top Pro

POSIX compatible

Top Con

Lags behind on features compared to ZSH and Fish

People who wants power features or to customize their shell experience use zsh or fish. See More

Top Pro

Emacs-like keyboard control

By default, BASH uses shortcuts and concepts very similar to Emacs, so learning one often results in familiarity with the other. See More

Top Con

Filename expansion is not consistent

filename expansion is not consistent. "echo *" will print the names of the files in your current dir, if there are any... and will print "*" if there are none. See More

Top Pro

Rich built-in features

By default, there are many built-in features. They make really complex and reliable programs possible. In comparison to dash, for example, you can do the same tasks in less time and fewer lines of code. See More

Top Con

Non-intuitive shell expansion in for loops

If there are no .sh files, this will print mask itself: for filename in *.sh; do echo $filename done See More

Top Pro

Variables and aliases are listed the way they are built

alias and set will list aliases and variables in a format that can be run directly with no modifications. Even if the values contain \n. This is handy if you want to modify a value. See More

Top Con

No out-of-the-box command autocompletion

To have command autocompletion in bash you need to install third-party plug-ins. See More

Top Pro

Recursive globbing

ls **/*.log for example is supported by Bash if you set shopt -s globstar. See More

Top Con

One of the most dangerous languages around

What it is mostly used for are file system operations. Guess what it is bad at? Operating on files. It automatically splits and carries out filename expansion on every single string resulting from variable expansion and command substitution unless quoted, by default on whitespace, whilst spaces are very common in filenames. Before that, it even does pathname expansion, so woe to anywone who does not want to actually operate on files, but has a globbing metacharacter stored anywhere in a variable. This means what you store in a variable is not going to be what will ACTUALLY be accessed. If an empty variable is unquoted, it disappears completely due to word splitting, sometimes leading to applications signalling a missing parameter at a wrong position. If quoted however, said variables cannot be iterated over in a loop, no matter what character one uses for word splitting. If you use any globbing pattern with a command, be sure to use -- after the option arguments or if none are present, before starting the pattern with a mandatory ./ Otherwise, another Bash script run gone wrong or a hacker can create files named like an option ("-f", for instance) and your program will happily accept it as such, if it results from globbing. For interactive use, it is convenient. For programming, it is a no-go. See More

Top Pro

Man page is a trove of wonders

While the manual "page" is nearly a hundred pages long, it is actually surprisingly succinct and stuffed with good information. It is often better than Googling for answers when writing shell scripts. The way it is written makes it easy to stumble upon useful new programming features just by flipping through it . NOTE: If you find it dense and hard to read at the command line, look for the PDF version. See More

Top Pro

vi mode is more comprehensive than on other shells

Vi editing mode works without a glitch. "_" will print you the last argument of the latest command (zsh won't). VI mode is fast off the bat - You don't have to reset any variable (like "KEYTIMEOUT" in zsh) for that. See More

Top Pro

Copyright license is GPL 3+

Bash is licensed under the GNU General Public License ≥3, which gives much stronger assurances that the right to use it can't be restricted. For example, Microsoft would not be able to claim in court that, even though they've distributed Bash with the GPLv3, a license that explicitly grants people freedom, now Bash is essentially proprietary due to software patents and everyone who uses Bash owes them money. (This may sound ludicrous to those who were not alive when Microsoft tried a similar scheme against Linux fifteen years ago). The GPLv3 is a license that reflects the genuine ethical issues that arise when people give their time and skills to collaboratively build software. While most people wouldn't insist that their UNIX shell is licensed under the GPLv3+, it does matter and is a big PRO for Bash. See More

Top Pro

Built-in 'help'... helps a lot

Built-in 'help' provides quick and efficient help on builtins and keywords. See More

Top Pro

Rich scripting capabilities

BASH scripting is a rich and robust language. See More

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140 26

score 211 · Answer 3

fish (Friendly Interactive SHell)

Top Pro

Auto suggestions

fish suggests commands as you type, based on command history, completions, and valid file paths. As you type commands, you will see a completion offered after the cursor, in a muted gray color (which can be changed with the fish_color_autosuggestion variable). However, you can NEVER turn them off! See More

Top Con

Not POSIX compliant

Being POSIX-compliant may be essential to some, but it is not the be-all-and-end-all. Much of the trouble with POSIX-compliant shells is BECAUSE of POSIX, since it captures the poor behavior and syntax that existed. In most cases, POSIX-compliance is a fool's errand since there are significant differences between implementations of even the same shell (e.g., Bash, etc.) on various platforms. Although fish tries not to break POSIX compatibility without a good reason, and despite efforts to implement a compatibility mechanism, you can face some issues if POSIX compatibility is expected/required. Though, enthusiasts fix these cases. For example, add set shell=sh in your .vimrc to solve the issue for vim. See More

Top Pro

Excellent documentation

It has a great tutorial. And the official documentation is clear, full of eloquent examples, and to the point. See More

Top Con

Doesn't support history expansion ("!!")

Fish has no support for !!, but you can use Oh My Fish shell framework and install bang-bang plugin to have this shortcut in Fish shell. The downside of using bang-bang is that it takes over ones default key bindings, for those that don't use them it should not be an issue but for those that do it is an annoyance to be considered. For sudo !!, this can also be achieved by making this custom function: function sudo if test "$argv" = !! eval command sudo $history[1] else command sudo $argv end end See More

Top Pro

Already set up for you

While other shells require a lot of set up to act the way you want them to and to have some useful features, fish works perfectly out of the box. It has all the most widely used features baked in and are there out of the box without having the need to install plugins or tweak any configuration files. See More

Top Con

Very slow

Much of the functionality in Fish was not written with performance in mind. However, scripting in a shell is not supposed to be about performance. If you need it, use a full-blown programming environment to get it. Shells are for gluing the high-performance tools together. See More

Top Pro

Pretty usable even without plugins

Everything you need from oh-my-zsh is available on default fish, don't need to install any plugins. And even better, fish is smaller than zsh. See More

Top Pro

Universal variables

You can define Universal variables, which are shared instantaneously through all running fish sessions and persists through shell restarts. See More

Top Pro

Interactive searchable history

Fish has by far the best way to work with history, everything is automatically searchable. It works in the way you expect. No learning required. See More

Top Pro

Adding, removing and editing aliases is extremely easy

Top Pro

Creates completion files from manual pages

Fish_update_completions parses manual pages installed on the system, and attempts to create completion files in the fish configuration directory. See More

Top Pro

Fisherman ⚑ A fast, modern plugin manager for fish

Large test coverage, micro-second shell start, compatibility with plugins from other existing frameworks such as Tackle, Oh My Fish and Wahoo, cache system, offline index, the Fishery and other features. See More

Top Pro

Intuitive shell expansion in "for" loops

Unlike bash, this won't return you string *.sh if no .sh files are found for filename in *.sh echo "$filename" end See More

Top Pro

Less ambiguous lists

Here is a sample. Notice that there are 2 files with spaces in names. ls produces a valid list, and for loop correctly iterated through its values. ➤ for a in (ls); ls -l $a; end -rw-rw-r-- 1 sashka sashka 0 Apr 19 03:16 alma mater.txt -rw-rw-r-- 1 sashka sashka 0 Apr 19 03:16 whatever i want.txt sh scripts tend to be fragile when there are lists containing values with spaces. Also: ➤ echo $PATH /usr/bin /bin /usr/sbin /sbin /usr/local/bin ➤ echo $PATH[1] /usr/bin ➤ echo $PATH[-1] /usr/local/bin See More

Top Pro

High portability

Because it needs very little configuration to work properly, you can use Fish everywhere. If you are working on a system you don't usually work, installing Fish from the repository is easy and will give you the same experience as the installation on your own machine without having to drag a dotfile around. See More

Top Pro

Auto indentation when creating functions

When writing functions in an interactive shell, it will auto-indent as needed for if, for, function, etc. See More

Top Pro

Awesome, consistent, not-confusing sytax

The following, for example: for file in (find . -name "*.foo" -type f) fgrep -H "something" $file echo "hello" $file end | grep -v "hello" Will run the for loop, take all the stdout from it (both the fgrep and echo), and then pipe it through the final grep command. See More

Top Pro

Configuration framework for fish shell

Fish community maintains Oh My Fish, which is a shell framework inspired on Oh My Zsh awesome design and name. It offer a lot of beautiful prompt themes and awesome plugins, is lightweight, awesome and very simple to use. See More

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211 27

score 51 · Answer 4

Xonsh (The Xonsh Shell)

Top Pro

Easy to understand, Python-like syntax

Xonsh uses a syntax which is a superset of Python 3.4 plus some additional shell primitives. Because of the similarity to Python, which is famously an easy to understand programming language, the syntax of Xonsh is pretty easy to grasp too, even more so for Python programmers. See More

Top Pro

Extensible

Most parts of xonsh are extensible. You can change tab-completer, prompt, history backend, aliases, functions and pack it to special package (called "xontrib") and put it on Github. The logic are clear and documented well. See More

Top Pro

Portable

The xonsh shell has AppImage that makes it Linux-portable. See More

Top Pro

Command history on steroids - including output

Xonsh has one feature that can be considered particularly unique. It stores not just the commands you type, but their output, and doing a search on your history (configurably) can search the output as well. See More

Top Pro

Cross platform support

Xonsh has native cross-platform support. See More

51 10

score 308 · Answer 5

zsh

Top Con

Not fully compatible with bash

There is a small chance you may have a bash script that doesn't work in zsh, although this is very very rare and most developers will never run into any issues. See More

Top Pro

Interactive autocompletion

When you start typing a command, you can press the tab key and it will complete the command you started typing. If there are multiple potential commands, you can choose which one to run by simply pressing tab again. Case-insensitive by default, too. See More

Top Con

Requires a lot of configuration to be used fully

Zsh requires a lot of tinkering with configuration files and downloading plugins in order to be able to do tasks which other shells may be able to do out of the box. See More

Top Pro

Powerful community-driven tools via oh-my-zsh

Oh-my-zsh is a community-driven framework, which helps users with their zsh configuration and plugins. 400 plugins, 200+ themes and auto-updates to always be up to date. See More

Top Con

Defaults are unfriendly for a long-time bash user

Expect to find a configuration you like (or use the configuration utility) to set reasonable preferences. Default zsh interaction is different enough to make you stutter through what used to be familiar workflows. See More

Top Pro

Autocomplete for options

Zsh intelligently determines if you are trying to complete a file path or an option, and pressing tab after typing - will reliably bring up a list of options. See More

Top Pro

Good bash compatibility

Things you've learned using bash will largely apply to zsh. Scripts written in bash will run with little to no modification. See More

Top Pro

Safer variable behaviour

Unlike Bash, zsh does not split unquoted variables by default, making it less error-prone. See More

Top Pro

Recursive globbing

ls **/*.log for example is supported by ZSH. See More

Top Pro

Great install procedure

Zsh will take you through a procedure which is roughly 30 minutes in length before during install. Through this procedure it asks you to set different options and customize the shell the way you want it to. Most of these settings are also found in other shells, but to customize them you have to go dig configuration files while zsh allows you to do it in the beginning. See More

Top Pro

Shared histories

If you spend a lot of time in the terminal, most likely you will have several terminal windows open. Zsh has great support for command line histories. The history is unique and shared through all the different instances. See More

Top Pro

Smart escaping

Zsh can determine the context of the command you're typing in and determine if it should escape characters if you're typing in a URI. See More

Top Pro

Pipe output to a temporary file:

Some programs don't support loading from stdin, but ZSH can store outputs to a temporary file, example: unzip =(curl http://example.com/someZipFile.zip) See More

Top Pro

Faster spelling correction

Zsh' s correct (or correctall) is vastly superior to Bash's attempt at spelling correction. See More

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308 43

score 219 · Answer 6

Pascal

Top Pro

Understanding of basics

Because of the verbosity and easy syntax, Pascal language is relatively easier to be learned and understood, even for someone who has no programming knowledge. It's said that Pascal code —if written well— is like reading pseudo code. See More

Top Con

Niche language

Most use of this language will be found in jobs supporting legacy code. It will be hard to find things to do with this language outside of that niche. See More

Top Pro

Easy

Pascal / Object pascal was used in schools during the 2000's to teach kids the basics of object oriented programming. See More

Top Con

No up-to-date version of language standards

In 1983, and update in 1990, the language was standardized with two standards: ISO/IEC 7185:1990 Pascal and ISO/IEC 10206:1990 Extended Pascal. However, Object Pascal extensions to the language have no official standards but in 1993, a draft proposal for object oriented Pascal standard was re; for review purposes only. There are no standards for modern features and enhancements, thus various Pascal dialects like Delphi or HP Pascal has their own enhancements and features. See More

Top Pro

Clear syntax

Pascal's syntax is clear and concise, for example: procedure test(); begin DoSomething(); end; See More

Top Con

Effectively obsolete

While this may have been an ok choice 25 years ago, it no longer is. Consider Python, Go or Clojure. See More

Top Pro

Enforces good programming practice

Numerous strong compile time checks with optional runtime checks ensure one doesn't do stupid things and even when one does (because the compiler can't prove it at compile time), the binary will check and report it at runtime. Correct modular programming implementation with proper namespacing, no file inclusion hack. See More

Top Con

Unnecessary heavy syntax

Begin.. end. Pascal would have been great with curly braces.. but then again, that's what C is for. It's an academic language which was used in the past, but not much anymore today. See More

Top Pro

Cross platform

Pascal development tools are available almost on every available platform, especially using Free Pascal. Pascal language is available on desktop like Mac, BSD, Linux, Windows, Solaris, etc.; on mobile like iOS, Android, etc.; also on managed environments like Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and .Net/Mono framework . There are even some Pascal to JavaScript transpilers such as Smart Pascal, so you can write client side web app using Pascal as well, if you really want to. See More

Top Con

All variables, types, constants and functions must be declared at the beginning of the code

Top Pro

Tons of academic reading

Being known as the programming language for education, especially in the 90's, there many academic reading and tutorials available on the internet. See More

Top Pro

Fast compilation

The compiler is fast, really fast. Compared to C/C++, the delphi compiler is designed to compile a decent sized desktop application in seconds rather than minutes. See More

Top Pro

Flexible

Using the Free Pascal Compiler (the main Pascal distribution) you can code in a language that can be procedural and imperative now, but it can became object-oriented simply adding a directive at the start of the source See More

Top Pro

Easy GUI creation

Visual Basic may have predated Delphi but Delphi was the ground breaking visual designer which set the standards expected today by most GUI developers. Its rich component set was well designed, structured and extensible, it even has the ability to display live data from the attached database in its data controls. See More

Top Pro

Assembler Code and DLL/SO creation

You can put Assembler code in Intel or AT&T formats, to achieve great results of speed and accuracy. It is possible to create Dynamic Link Libraries or their equivalent in Unix-like systems so it's relatively easy to use and powerful. See More

Top Pro

Rich existing libraries

Both shipped with implementations and spread all over the web. Both natively written or bindings to libraries written in other languages. Typically to build non-trivial applications there's no need to surf the web as many things are implemented already. Streaming, output templating, socket & networking, web, database, image manipulation, high performance graphics, (de)compression, (de|en)cryption, regex, unit testing, json manipulation, google API, indexing, multithreading, external process management, the list just goes on and on! See More

Top Pro

Still active

From the early roots of Pascal, Delphi has been developed and is still actively supported. It is used in many desktop applications today, and even supports multi platform coding. See More

Top Pro

Suitably close to modern languages, without the pitfalls

It was developed as a teaching language and it shows. No syntax pitfalls and gently encourages good style. See More

Top Pro

Extensive third party libraries

There are large collections of third party components, many free which enable developers to add wide ranging and complex functionality to their code with ease See More

Top Pro

Component based (reusability, decoupled, rich design architecture)

Top Pro

Reliable language and code base

Most code from the Turbo Pascal days in the 80s still compiles, yet the language has since been adapted and extended with modern concepts, introducing OOP and interfaces, exception handling, native Unicode support, anonymous methods, generics, ARC and more. See More

Top Pro

Available on a ridiculous number of platforms

FreePascal is available on/for Intel x86 (including 8086), AMD64/x86-64, PowerPC, PowerPC64, SPARC, ARM, AArch64, MIPS and the JVM. Supported operating systems include Linux, FreeBSD, Haiku, Mac OS X/iOS/iPhoneSimulator/Darwin, DOS (16 and 32 bit), Win32, Win64, WinCE, OS/2, MorphOS, Nintendo GBA, Nintendo DS, Nintendo Wii, Android, AIX and AROS. See More

Top Pro

Language depth

Object Pascal is being used to write custom kernels (Ultibo) and operating-systems for various ARM boards. So the way you work with the code scales from low-level to pure OOP high-level. Object Pascal has the same level of depth that you find in C/C++ but with added productivity. See More

Top Pro

Incredible GUI design tools

Lazarus and Delphi are both incredible GUI design tools, making rapid development a reality. Making changes to a GUI doesn't mean switching tools or waiting for things to load, it's right there as part of your core tools. See More

Top Pro

Dynamic evolution of language

Object Pascal language still evolving and being updated by Delphi (Embarcadero) and Free Pascal team (Lazarus). See More

Top Pro

Well balanced for desktop development

For desktop development, Delphi is productive, the code is easy to understand, compilation speed is blazing, and it produces well performing applications that are easy to deploy. The perfect balance between C# and C++. See More

Top Pro

Fast execution

The compiler generates fast and optimized code. No stop-the-universe garbage collection. See More

Top Pro

Automatic memory management

The new Delphi compilers are powered by Automatic Reference Counting to ease development. See More

Top Pro

Excellent database development

Specs

Standard:ISO/IEC 7185:1990 Pascal and ISO/IEC 10206:1990 Extended Pascal

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219 58

score 17 · Answer 7

tcsh (shell)

Top Pro

C-like shell

It's a C-like shell with tenex command-completion feature, which is very convenient. See More

Top Con

Limited support online

The support and number of guides and tutorials is rather limited for tcsh online because there are not many people who use it. At least compared to some of the other more popular alternatives. See More

Top Pro

Organized documentation

All the documentation that's needed to use tcsh is located in man tcsh instead of being spread on various helper programs. See More

17 9

score 9 · Answer 8

sh

Top Con

Not suitable for interactive use

The Bourne shell has always been criticized (most notably by Bill Joy, author of csh) as being unfriendly for interactive use. It has no tilde (~) expansion. Limited file test operators. Limited math operators. See More

Top Pro

Truely the most broadly available shell

It may not be the best if you want power, but if you want to write a POSIX script that will run everywhere, it's a pretty good choice. See More

Top Pro

Most influential Unix shell alongside csh

Bourne shell introduced features such as piping, here documents, command substitution, variables, control structures for condition-testing and looping and filename wildcarding. See More

9 7

score 35 · Answer 9

Assembly

Top Pro

Low Level - it's how the computer works

One of the best ways to learn how a computer actually works is to work your way up from lower level abstractions. Assembly, being only a level above machine code, is low enough level to make it clear how the computer is actually performing a computation, including code flow and loops, but high enough level to not be excessively tedious for the type of small projects that a student would do at the beginning of their first programming class. Use of an assembler with macros can stretch this even a bit further. See More

Top Con

Difficult learning curve

Starting off as a beginner with assembly language could prove very daunting. I suggest learning a high level language first (e.g. C) to get a good grasp of programming - especially dealing with bits, bytes, numbers, accessing memory with pointers (which is why I suggest C). Then once that person is comfortable writing C (or whatever high level language) programs, they would find moving to assembler a little less of a "What the hell?!!!" experience. See More

Top Pro

Naturally creates fast and small programs

Because of its natural syntax and low-level nature, assembly language programs are typically really small and fast. Unlike other programming languages, in assembly language it is really hard to create a slow and over-bloated program. See More

Top Con

Rarely a requirement or used in professional employment

(except for experts, which will outperform you in assembly language and execution speed on any day of the week, simply because they have full control of the processor.) See More

Top Pro

You must look into it if you really want to understand what computers do

There is no other way to understand a processor, so dig in. See More

Top Con

Not very portable

The instruction set may change depending on what CPU architecture is being used. Also, there will be some differences in implementations due to different assemblers being used, such as with changes in OS. See More

Top Pro

Useful for embedded systems

A curriculum that involves an embedded component, such as an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi, can encourage students by allowing them to immediately connect their work with 'real systems'. Assembly is the ideal language for getting started with and understanding these devices, and since Assembly can be called from C, the code will still be useful if students move on to C later in the program. See More

Top Con

Language for those sadists that like pain

Not recommended as a first language. However, in small doses to show how higher level code is executed, can be of some value. Is also a language that will take a longer time to learn or finish projects with, so usually not for those who are in a hurry to get anything in particular done. See More

Top Pro

Uniform syntax

Assembly language syntax is relatively uniform, and so there's less room for a student to get confused by obscure characters, or miss some meaning implied by structure, such as with scoping rules, or call-by-name/value/reference semantics. While there may be a lot of mnemonics to look up, most work involves only a very small subset of them. See More

Top Con

Hyperspecific syntax isn't a good first step to learning other modern languages

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35 58

score 12 · Answer 10

Ion (shell)

Top Pro

Supports type-checking of assignments

All variable assignments may optionally specify a type, which will enforce that the supplies value is compatible with that type before storing it, returning an error if there's a mis-match. See More

Top Con

Still in development

There's a number of paper cuts that have yet to be addressed. It's been progressing very rapidly though. Some features have yet to be implemented, some logic bugs have yet to be fixed, and it's not been tested much in the wild. Very early in it's life as of 2017. See More

Top Pro

Features slicing syntax

Arrays are sliced by elements, and strings are sliced by graphemes. See More

Top Con

Unubiquitous

There's a big advantage to picking a shell which is ubiquitous, since you are likely to work with more than your own systems, and likely want the same or a similar experience there. See More

Top Pro

Easy to learn

The entire Rust ecosystem is known for having excellent, modern documentation, and Ion is no exception. Couple that with it having far less cruft (ie fewer things to learn) some syntactic and conceptual inspiration from Rust, and suddenly you have a very easy to learn (and still very powerful) shell. See More

Top Pro

Distinguishes between arrays and strings

Generally more type-safe, enabling explicitness, and allowing for powerful slicing and method syntax. See More

Top Pro

Faster than all other system shells

Ion actually manages to be faster than Dash -- simultaneously using less memory and packing much more functionality. See More

Top Pro

A simple, modern, and clean syntax

Syntax is much simpler than other shells, leading to very elegant and succinct scripts and command invocations. See More

Top Pro

Written in Rust

Shells written in C are often riddled with memory-based vulnerabilities that lead to high profile security flaws that are continually discovered decades later. GNU Bash's Shellshock vulnerability, for example, is an example of a vulnerability that Rust prevents. Rust raises the bar for minimum code quality standards by enforcing various restrictions on type/variable usage, and therefore Ion provides a high quality code base from the start. See More

Top Pro

Can be compiled as a static binary

There are no dependencies on C or C libraries (except for the minimum required to run on Linux). By opting for the MUSL target toolchain, a fully static binary can be generated and distributed to systems. See More

Top Pro

Color namespace with 24-bit color syntax

It is exceptionally easy to use 24-bit colors in the shell with Ion's c/color namespace. echo ${c::0x09F}Bluish text${c::0x630bg}with a brownish background${c::reset} See More

Top Pro

Method syntax enables a new level of capabilities

Offers a unique concept of string and array methods, whereby invoking the name of a method, and supplying arguments to it, you can perform otherwise complex text manipulation at expansion time. Also supports recursively processing the results of method expansions within method expansions. See More

Top Pro

Supports a namespaces concept

A special syntax allows for obtaining values from within special namespaces -- either namespaces that are built into the shell, such as the color namespace, or from plugins, such as the git plugin. See More

Top Pro

Supports a plugin architecture

Plugins may be integrated within Ion using a C FFI. These plugins can add additional methods and namespaces. See More

Top Pro

May be used as a library

Ion shell is featured within the distributed Concurr application, by the same author of Ion, which creates embedded instances of the Ion shell in the server for executing commands locally. See More

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12 2

score 11 · Answer 11

Xtend

Top Con

Difficult to configure in Android Studio

Top Pro

Ruby-like syntactic conveniences

Lambdas are written like Smalltalk's blocks. If it's the last argument, it can go after the parentheses like Ruby's blocks. Parentheses on method calls are optional. See More

Top Con

Slower compilation

Unlike most JVM languages, Xtend compiles to Java rather than directly to JVM bytecode. So you have to compile everything four times for Android: from Xtend to Java, from Java to JVM bytecode (.class files), from .class to .dex bytecode, and then AOT compilation from .dex to native ARM upon installation. This can really slow down development and testing vs a more interactive language like Clojure. See More

Top Pro

Type inference

It uses Java's static type system, but you don't have to declare the type of everything all the time, since the Xtend compiler can usually figure it out. This also dramatically cuts down on Java's infamous verbosity. See More

Top Pro

Code runs just as fast as Java

Because Xtend relies heavily on JDK and Android classes, it runs just as fast as native Java code. See More

Top Pro

Easy to switch back to Java

Xtend is a low-risk option. Because it compiles to human-readable Java, if you decide you don't like it for your project, you can just switch back to Java without losing your work. See More

Top Pro

Extend even library classes with new methods

This is where it gets its name. You can open classes and add new methods, kind of like Ruby. (Of course this has to be compiled to Java, so really it lives in a kind of helper class.) See More

Top Pro

Succint

Uses functional features ,which are very concise and idiomatic. Plus it has annotations, which cuts down on the Java boilerplate. See More

Top Pro

Better defaults than Java

Methods are public if you don't specify, and fields are private. Locals declared with val in Xtend are final in Java. This dramatically cuts down on Java's infamous verbosity. See More

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11 2

score 28 · Answer 12

Angular

Top Pro

Great tooling and language support

Very good CLI and webpack, bundling, testing, deployment support. Deep TypeScript integration and support. See More

Top Con

Slightly over-engineered

Very enterprisey - made for huge architectures and with tons of declarative, non-intuitive annotations it makes it overkill for very small projects. See More

Top Con

Native i18n support over-engineered

Not developer-friendly. Switching languages need reloading the whole page. There are third party solutions that work better. See More

28 5

score 54 · Answer 13

Tcl

Top Pro

Standard library

Unlike *sh Tcl has a rich standard library. See More

Top Pro

Sane quoting rules

Unlike in sh you don't need to quote your variable substitutions ('"$1"'). Expanding of arguments occurs mostly explicit and if yet expected in-place (e. g. using eval or subst) it follows strict and well clear rules. So exec test $argv would execute test with single argument. And appending {*} before $argv would execute test with all arguments (list expansion). See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform

With a little care you can have the same script work on Linux, *BSD, OS X and Windows. See More

Top Pro

Widely available

You can expect a reasonably recent version of Tcl to either installed or available in the repositories of any popular open source *nix. See More

Top Pro

Everything is a string

Tcl can operate at the same level of abstraction as the POSIX shell, which makes it easier to manipulate the output of other programs. See More

Top Pro

Tk and Expect

Top Pro

Standalone packages

Tcl enables easy deployment through self-contained binaries known as starpacks. See More

Top Pro

Rich scripting capabilities on a single line

Want to run something 5 times? Here you go: set i 0; time { puts done-[incr i] } 5 If you need real conditional cycle? Not a problem: for {set ready 0; set i 1} {$i <= 100 && !$ready} {incr i} { if {[exec do-some-thing] eq "ready" } {set ready 1} } Want to measure performance of something or repeat it max 300 times and not longer than 1 seconds? Very simple: timerate { after 20 } 1000 300 How about notifying yourself when some http-server is back online? Sure thing: while {[catch { close [socket localhost 80] }]} { after 1000 }; puts "\7\7\7ONLINE!" And you can do it also fully asynchronously using events etc. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

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54 12

score 3 · Answer 14

Oh (shell)

Top Con

Unstable

It fails with errors and long Python tracebacks. See More

Top Pro

Concurrent

Because it's written in Go, Oh can also be thought of as a concurrent programming language. See More

Top Con

No configurable prompt

The only way to configure the prompt in order to use something else other than the default >, you have to change the source code of Oh. See More

3 1

score 8 · Answer 15

MS PowerShell

Top Pro

Helpful Help

The help system is designed to evolve over time; running update-help downloads the latest content. When searching for help on items, you can simply type help commandname to get information about a command. If you're not sure what you're looking for, but have a rough idea, you can search on partial command names, or even specify specific verbs to get a list of commands potentially of interest; e.g. help -verb write. The information in help gives a good overview of the commands you're looking at, along with code examples, so you can see real-world usage without resorting to the web. See More

Top Con

Very verbose

The commands themselves, as well as the output and error messages, are VERY verbose See More

Top Pro

Splatting

When calling a method with multiple parameters, rather than passing one variable per parameter you're able to "splat" one variable to the method, with the parameters taking their values from its properties. See More

Top Pro

Pipeline

Commands can be chained via the pipeline, allowing output from one to be cleanly fed as input to the next. See More

Top Pro

Chocolatey Package

PowerShell is installable through Chocolatey. See More

Top Pro

Extensible

The language can wrap and interact with code written in other language's, making it highly extensible. See More

Top Pro

Multi-Platform (ish)

Though Windows Powershell only works on Windows, the open source implementation Pash (http://pash.sourceforge.net/) allows the same language to be run on other OSes. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

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8 3

score 148 · Answer 16

ClojureScript

Top Pro

Live interactive programming with figwheel

Figwheel builds your ClojureScript code and hot loads it into the browser as you are coding! Every time you save your ClojureScript source file, the changes are sent to the browser so that you can see the effects of modifying your code in real time. See More

Top Con

Tooling is horrible

I've never seen worse tooling before. Writing tests and getting test coverage reports is near impossible. Tooling is brittle and clunky. Feels prehistoric. See More

Top Pro

Simple syntax

Lispness makes ClojureScript trivial to comprehend after an initial learning overhead. See More

Top Con

Syntax may seem cryptic to people not used to Lisp

Lisp is sometimes called "syntax-less" and this is bewildering to those steeped in Algol-type syntax (Java, Javascript, C, etc). Being a dialect of Lisp, ClojureScript's syntax may seem cryptic and hard to understand for people not used to it. While Lisp has very little syntax compared to other languages and it's generally considered pretty terse, there's still an initial overhead in learning the language. See More

Top Pro

Easy to use existing JavaScript libraries

Clojure and ClojureScript are designed to be able to interact with their host. So the language by design makes it is easy to use existing JS libraries. See More

Top Pro

Targets Google Closure-ready JavaScript for immense optimizations

Google's Closure Library converts regular JavaScript into a highly optimized form - including dead code analysis/elimination. It can even remove pieces of unused code from 3rd party libraries (eg, if you import jQuery but only use one function, Google Closure includes only that piece). See More

Top Pro

Share application logic between browser and Clojure server

Clojure is also able to run web servers, so one can reap similar benefits to NodeJS in terms of sharing code between client and server. See More

Top Pro

Can be used with React out of the box

Top Pro

Excellent build tools

Both Leiningen and Boot are great build tools that manage code dependencies and deployment. See More

Top Pro

Excellent tools for web development

ClojureScript has superb wrappers around React.js (see Reagent) that make building single-page apps a breeze. With figwheel, it's a web dev experience unlike any other -- hotloaded code, repl interaction, and instantly reflected changes make good development fun and fast. You can add things like Garden to make CSS-writing part of the same holistic experience and suddenly all development is a pleasant, smooth process. See More

Top Pro

The Spec core library

From the creator of Clojure: Spec is a new core library (Clojure 1.9 and Clojurescript) to support data and function specifications in Clojure. Writing a spec should enable automatic: Validation, Error reporting, Destructuring, Instrumentation, Test-data generation and Generative test generation. See More

Specs

Current stable version:1.9

GZipped size:32 kB

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148 40

score 235 · Answer 17

Julia

Top Pro

Almost as fast as C

Julia runs almost as fast as (and in fact in some cases faster than) C code. See More

Top Con

Young language with limited support

Julia was released in 2012. Due to its short existence, there is a limited amount of support for the language. Very few libraries exist as of yet, and the community is still quite small (though growing quickly). See More

Top Pro

Strong dynamic typing

Dynamic and high level, but does not isolate the user from properly thinking about types. Can do explicit type signatures which is great for teaching structured thinking. See More

Top Con

1-based array and column major

This design probably comes from Matlab, but makes it unnatural to interface C and C++ and python. See More

Top Pro

Great standard REPL

Out of the box Julia has a very good Read-Eval-Print-Loop, which both completes functions and types, as well as completion based on history of previous statements. It integrates well with the shell and has an excellent online help system. See More

Top Pro

Nice regular syntax

Julia code is easy to read and avoid a lot of unnecessary special symbols and fluff. It uses newline to end statements and "end" to end blocks so there is no need for lots of semicolons and curly braces. It is regular in that unless it is a variable assignment, function name always comes first. No need to be confused about whether something is a method on an object or a free function. Unlike Python and Ruby, since you can annotate the types a function operates on, you can overload function names, so that you can use the same function name for many data types. So you can keep simple descriptive function names and not have to invent artificial function names to separate them from the type they operate on. See More

Top Pro

Written in itself

The Julia language is written in itself to a much larger extent than most other languages, so a budding programmer can read through the depths of the standard library and learn exactly how things work all the way down to the low-level bit-twiddling details, which can be englightening. See More

Top Pro

Powerful n-dimensional arrays

Julia has built in n-dimensional arrays similar in functionality as Python's numpy. See More

Top Pro

Function overloading

You can have multiple functions with the same name, but doing different things depending on function arguments and argument types. See More

Top Pro

Amazing learning curve

Julia requires no boilerplate code – a beginner needs to write only the parts they care about. This combined with the REPL provides the best learning experience available. See More

Top Pro

High-level code

Julia provides a high level of abstraction, making platform-independent programming trivial and easing the learning curve. See More

Top Pro

Function and operator broadcasting

You can perform operations on scalars, for example 2^2 or [1, 2, 3].^2. See More

Top Pro

Strong Metaprogramming

Julia allows you to edit Julia code in the language itself and write powerful macros. It is a great introduction to metaprogramming features See More

Top Pro

REPL-based

The Julia REPL allows quickly testing how some code behaves and gives access to documentation and package management immediately in the REPL. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac, FreeBSD

Current stable version:1.5.3

Type Model:Dynamically Typed

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235 63

score 174 · Answer 18

V

Top Pro

Fast like C

V is easier than C and fast like C. See More

Top Con

Rapid changes in a language syntax/features

Since V language under a continuous development and core syntax and features will be "frozen" in a version 1.0.0, updating from older version of a language can cause a code rewrite of previously working program. See More

Top Pro

C Interop

Can import C libraries, structs, and headers. See More

Top Con

V 1.0 release was planned for December 2019

The first version of the language was publicly released in June of 2019, version 0.1.x. First beta version of the language was released June of 2022, version 0.3. x. Language has progressed faster than most. Welcomes contributors to join the project. See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Compile to many OSes. See More

Top Pro

Simplicity

V is simple and powerful. See More

Top Pro

Can create multi-OS GUIs

Multi-OS GUI creation is more integrated into the language than others. See More

Top Pro

Clear syntax

Highly understandable language. See More

Top Pro

Sum types

V has Sum Types. See More

Top Pro

Generics

V has generics. See More

Top Pro

Closures

V has closures, which gives the user additional options and usefulness. See More

Top Pro

Safety

V is very safe. See More

Top Pro

Single paradigm

Follows the philosophy that there should be only one way to do something, as opposed to multi-paradigm languages like C++. See More

Top Pro

Supports concurrency and channels

Can run functions concurrently that communicate over channels. See More

Top Pro

Fast compile times

Compiles programs fast, less waiting around, so more productive and fun. See More

Top Pro

Friendly and helpful community

Just check the V Discord channel or their GitHub Discussions and you will see by yourself. See More

Top Pro

Inline assembly

Can add Assembly code. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

License:MIT

Supported platforms:Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonflyBSD, Solaris, Android, iOS

Developer:Alexander Medvednikov

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174 49

score 107 · Answer 19

Pharo

Top Con

Small community

But they are very friendly and supportive. Best help comes through the mailing lists so not always easily googlable. There is also a Slack community where help is nearly instantaneous. See More

Top Pro

Object-Oriented

In Pharo everything is an object. Compiler - object, network - object, method - also an object. And objects communicate with messages. No operators, no control-flow statements. Just objects and messages. Few things to learn, but you can learn OOP well. See More

Top Con

Odd language

Requires a different mindset. Much harder to apply what you know from popular or conventional languages . Switching over from or between other languages is more difficult. See More

Top Pro

Easily learnt

There is good, free documentation including several books written by experts with extensive examples. There is an online MOOC. There are many tutorial videos. Supportive conferences and community. Even a professional support option if desired. See More

Top Con

Single threaded

Pharo's VM only ever uses one CPU core. If you want to write code that uses more than one CPU core, you need to jump through hoops such as running multiple VMs and synchronising your data. See More

Top Pro

Live updates

The nature of Pharo being a "live" environment allows you to perform live updates to your system without requiring to restart it. You can upgrade/modify classes while serving requests at the same time. See More

Top Pro

Highly productive

Top Pro

Seaside

The framework for developing sophisticated web applications in Smalltalk is developed in Pharo. Seaside lets you build highly interactive web applications quickly, reusably and maintainably. See More

Top Pro

Remote debugging

Top Pro

Beautiful coding patterns in your IDE

No need to search google for compact beautiful examples of how to do things, your live environment source is available and you can easily live search, see how it works and copy how the masters would do it (examples most languages still copy too). See More

Top Pro

Glamorous toolkit & GTInspector

Most languages are still copying the Smalltalk tools of yesterday - GTInspector (written in Glamorous) takes live exploration of code/running objects to a new level. It's really slick, and better yet, you can easily write your own inspectors in 10 lines of code. See More

Top Pro

Code can be run on rock solid GemStone environment

Top Pro

64 bit support as of Pharo 7

Use 32 bit or 64 bit versions of Pharo on Windows, Mac & Linux. See More

Top Pro

Advanced code analysis tools

MOOSE environment provides extensive, easily leveraged and class leading tools for code analysis and improvement. See More

Top Pro

Can run headless for production

Top Pro

Really simple networking and REST with Zinc

Top Pro

Graphics, graphing and visualisation framework - Roassal

Roassal and Mondrian provide fantastic and easily used frameworks for graphics, graphing and advanced visualisations (comparable to D3.js) but with much less code. Visualisations can be rendered into web friendly graphics (SVG, .png etc.) without additional work. See More

Specs

Platforms:MacOSX; Linux; Windows

License:MIT

Auto Complete:Y

Typing discipline:Dynamically typed

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107 33

score 252 · Answer 20

Haxe

Top Pro

Compiles to multiple platforms and languages

Haxe allows you to develop for Web, iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows, OSX, Linux and others, all at once, without the need to switch languages and maintain separate code bases. This is possible because Haxe can compile to JavaScript, ActionScript, Flash AVM bytecode, C++, Neko, PHP, C# (.NET) and Java. Support for even more platforms and languages is under development. See More

Top Con

Bad support in some popular IDEs

While it has great support in Visual Studio Code and Vim for example, it still lacks support in some IDEs such as IntelliJ. See More

Top Pro

Powerfully expressive but easy to learn

The language was designed to be very expressive with the smallest possible amount of syntactic sugar. There are actually fewer keywords than other languages with similar power. See More

Top Con

You need to code interfaces to work with existing JavaScript code

Some popular libs like JQuery have maintained externs, for any specific code or lib already in JS you have to write the externs to use it in your haxe application. See More

Top Pro

Extremely fast compilation

Haxe can easily compile over 100,000 lines of code to JS in seconds on a mid-spec computer. See More

Top Con

No Qt support

There is currently no support for Qt. See More

Top Pro

Similar to JavaScript and ActionScript 3

The language is very easy to learn for those with background in JavaScript or ActionScript 3. See More

Top Con

Full programs only

You can create small utility functions with Haxe, but generally it is a lot more work than with other JS compilers. Haxe is best used when you have a larger project. See More

Top Pro

Large library support. From servers to games.

Haxelib (common library repo) and other sources contain large codebases for anything from cryptography to communications. A lot of these are fully cross platform and work with the JavaScript target. The JavaScript target can be used for everything from node.js server applications (with code completion) to games using either the Flash-like OpenFL library or direct canvas or WebGL programming. See More

Top Con

It's not easy to convince people it's as good as it really is unless you can get them to really try it

Top Pro

Established project

Haxe has been around for more than 10 years (since 2005) and whilst not the most popular project, has had continuous growth. Highly unlikely to disappear or for support to stop. See More

Top Pro

Friendly community

Friendly community See More

Top Pro

Pick up errors at compile time

One big advantage over pure javascript, (or some other languages listed here) is that Haxe will pick up a whole range of errors when you compile, saving you the pain of having to try and debug them later. This includes everything from syntax errors ("Unexpected ;") to type errors ("Class user has no field username. Suggestion: username"). See More

Top Pro

First class code completion

Code completion is built into the compiler and available to the IDE allowing for much smarter code completion that can actually parse and understand the syntax tree. See More

Top Pro

Small, readable output

The output that is generated can be trimmed using "dead code elimination" to only include those functions and libraries that are strictly necessary. All code is very readable with only minimal extras for specific functionality. Small output is good for frontend development as file size is a major concern. See More

Top Pro

Powerful type inference with strong typing

After a type is inferred from its context, it cannot be changed to a new type, and type safety is done at compile time so it stays safe without the extra maintenance required for static typing. See More

Top Pro

Syntactic macros

Syntactic macros allow you to extend compiler features at the syntax tree step. Macros come into play after code is parsed into the abstract syntax tree, and macros allow you to transform it before the rest of the compilation completes. This provides for immense power, while at the same time scoping the extensibility at a level that is powerful, but well constrained. See More

Top Pro

Code reuse server side and client side

You can use the same classes on the server as you do on the client where applicable. This saves a lot of time. See More

Top Pro

Ability to use existing JS libraries

Haxe has the ability to use "externs". These are haxe files which describe the usage of existing JS libraries. Get code completion and compile-time-checking for everything from jQuery to Node.js. Even without externs, native JS code can still be used through untyped code. See More

Top Pro

Can create complex applications without needing webpack, npm or other crutches

Haxe has the power and expression to not need the npm dependancy hell that is common in js and typescript, bit it's still simple. See More

Top Pro

Algebraic data types and pattern matching.

Top Pro

Offload execution to the server with remoting

Using a remoting proxy you can get type safe server to client communications, allowing for remote method execution on the server as if they were part of the client side code. See More

Top Pro

Package management like Java

Package tree is just directory tree, it's wonderful! See More

Top Pro

Builtin conditional compilation support

Haxe supports conditional compilation, so depending on compiler flags Haxe will include or exlcude sections of your code. Making it easy to have debug and release builds. See More

Top Pro

Abstract enums allow constants with exhaustiveness check

You can define constants in an abstract enum and when used in a switch/case statement Haxe checks for exhaustiveness, making sure every constant is covered - with no runtime implication. See More

Top Pro

Type safety for exísting JS libraries

Haxe compiler will check types when using externs for existing libraries. See More

Top Pro

Available in NPM

Top Pro

Ability to skip type checking when calling non Haxe code

You should use externs when calling non Haxe code, but if you just need to call one or two external JS functions, you can skip type checking by calling untyped code. See More

Top Pro

Create without needing to be limited to a language, target, or commercial ecosystem

Top Pro

Abstracts allows me to create more intative api's without runtime overhead

Specs

Platforms:Web, iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows, OSX, Linux

Supported languages:C++, C#, Java, Javascript, PHP, Lua, Python, Actionscript

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