argument passing

[matthewmueller]

I'm not sure if this is the direction you'd want to go with this project, but this sentence caught my attention:

Also since it's written in Go it's very simple to curl the binary on to any existing system.

That basically means, I could spin up a brand new ubuntu server on AWS, curl and run this right?

I think this could be more than a provisioning tool with argument passing. You could do something like:

stack scripts/release.go <version>

You get all the benefits of a modern language with the power of bash.

Again possibly out of scope, but it got me thinking :-D

[tj]

yeah I was thinking about making it a more generic shell-like language, I have mixed feelings on that since it's already (and will probably be more so) geared towards provisioning. I want to add variable support so that {foo} if not defined will prompt if it's missing or require that you pass --foo bar. Otherwise yup just curl it and run

[matthewmueller]

<3 {foo} prompting if no input, that'd be awesome.

[tj]

I want to change up the DSL (or lack of) quite a bit actually haha, might warrant doing a little interpreted language, stack will just be ship with that lang included and a bit of a runtime so it has the nice logging etc

[matthewmueller]

digging the Dockerfile style commands, but what do you have in mind?

[tj]

yea I like that too, I guess it's really just fancier set -e at the moment, which itself is pretty sweet for provisioning haha, sucks that the rest of shell scripting is so horrid. I just figure if I'm going to be adding non-shell directives for other things I might as well just make a new language I suppose.

I mostly just don't want to use Ruby or Python haha too much of a clusterfuck, shell is close but not expressive enough. Shell is pretty fucked though not sure I want to go down the road of supporting "native" shell commands with redirection and all that junk haha

[matthewmueller]

Shell has awful composition too. you can't include a function and use it later, so it's really annoying breaking up your files.

[tj]

yeah I have to say pretty much the only thing I like about shell scripts is that commands are first-class haha that's about it, foo(){} is a pretty nice syntax too but referencing args via positional vars is lame