The Abs Programming Language

Imho traditional shells are actually pretty limited in this regard; you generally can only compose programs in simple linear pipelines with one input one output. Technically bash does allow doing some stuff with additional fds, but it is not very convenient nor flexible in that regard. There have been some attempts to make more flexible shells, like for example dgsh: https://www2.dmst.aueb.gr/dds/sw/dgsh/

In YSH, you can do everything that bash does with processes, because OSH is the most bash-compatible shell in the world: https://pages.oils.pub/spec-compat/2025-09-14/renamed-tmp/sp...

For example, I think many of the newer shells don't implement process subs, a ksh/bash thing:

    ysh-0.35$ diff -u <(seq 2 3) <(seq 1 4)
    ...
    +1
    2
    3
    +4

      cat  <(seq ) <(seq 1 4); echo hi
           ^~
    [ interactive ]:39: errexit PID 693013: Command failed with status 1

    var obj = {}
    for n in (1 ..< 10) {
      if (n % 2 === 0) {
       setvar obj[str(n)] = 6 ** 2  # no rand function now
      }  
    }
    = obj  # pretty print with =
  
    # => (Dict)  {'2': 36, '4': 36, '6': 36, '8': 36}

ABS is listed on this wiki page, along with many Python- and JavaScript- influenced shells:

https://github.com/oils-for-unix/oils/wiki/Alternative-Shell...

https://koi-lang.dev/

https://github.com/alexst07/shell-plus-plus

https://hush-shell.github.io/

But YSH is the only one that has a process runtime that's a SUPERSET of bash

---

I also want to add to add xargs-like functionality to the runtime. I mentioned in the latest release that bash/xargs actually has a problem with waiting for processes in parallel, while ALSO checking for errors:

Eight Releases of Oils in 6 Months: https://oils.pub/blog/2025/09/releases.html

Python and a few others such as LISP, smalltalk, etc., have some affordances made for a developer at the keyboard. Oddly, most of them are not taught to developers, it seems. The number of people I have worked with that didn't know of python's `help` is stark.

I can definitely understand both points of view but my pov is that we shouldn't avoid projects solely because of these and that there are greater merits to choose from. We are more similar than different :) in foss community I suppose

Another thing is that sometimes, people don't like taglines telling how good the project is, like I searched fish and I love fish but fish is a smart and user-friendly command line shell for Linux, macOS, and the rest of the family.

Maybe its me as I could only vouch for the user friendly part of fish from my small time using it (and the time I mimicked every aspect of fish for my zsh config file). I truly loved fish but I might not be sure about its smartness and what it means by that and that might be a nitpick but I still love fish and would recommend it to some people

Maybe I can be wrong, I usually am and someone please feel free to correct me to make me understand what they mean by smart, I know that somethings scripting in fish can be more pleasant than bash and it has some nice features but just smart is really vague, I hope everybody gets it :)