Why another scripting language?

If you're a developer, chances are that you got your hands on a server at some point during your career and bumped into an .sh script

You might have felt, though, that the script was written in a fairly strange language, with a very untraditional syntax:

if [ -z $STRING ]; then
    ...
fi

(if you're wondering, the above snippet would check whether the variable $STRING is an empty string)

Far for bashing Bash (pun intended) or the generic shell command language (opens new window), we believe there should be a more straightforward alternative to automating tasks.

We believe the pragmatic Python or the elegant Ruby haven't been able to overcome Bash as the de-facto standard for shell scripting because of the inner simplicity of Bash (opens new window). Running programs in parallel, interacting with the underlying system, ease of portability... ...these are quick and easy wins when you're writing those .sh files.

We believe, though, there could be an alternative where a programmer would combine the syntax and flexibility of general-purpose languages (Python, Ruby and JS, to name a few) with the benefits of Bash.

This is why we developed the ABS programming language: a language that is a joy to work with in the context of shell scripting: it isn't here to replace the likes of PHP, Java or Python, neither it wants to diminish the importance of Bash.

ABS tries to mix a more modern syntax with the simplicity of Bash.

Let's take a look a look at some practical ABS code. We will now call the API of nba.com in order to retrieve the stats for one of the NBA games played in 2017:

r = `curl "http://data.nba.net/prod/v1/20170201/0021600732_boxscore.json" -H 'DNT: 1' -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, sdch' -H 'Accept-Language: en' -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/57.0.2987.133 Safari/537.36' -H 'Accept: */*' -H 'Referer: http://stats.nba.com/' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' --compressed`;

if !r.ok {
    echo("Could not fetch game data. Bummer!")
    exit(1)
}

doc = r.json()

name, city = doc.basicGameData.arena # arena is a JSON object: {"name": "TD Garden", "city": "Boston"}

echo("The game was played at the %s arena in %s", name, city)

highlight = doc.basicGameData.nugget.text

if highlight.len() {
    echo("The press said: \"%s\"", highlight)
}

# The game was played at the TD Garden in Boston
# The press said: "Thomas scores 19 of 44 points in 4th quarter"

You will notice 3 things:

• Isiah Thomas (opens new window) seems to be a really good player
• you should be very familiar with the above syntax
• the language is capable of seamlessly throwing shell commands into the mix

This is exactly why ABS was born: a familiar syntax, and the convenience of Bash.

A sneak-peek at some of the things ABS can elegantly do:

# Unix pipes work
ip = `curl icanhazip.com | tr -d '\n'`

# We now have a string -> "10.10.10.12"
echo(ip)

# Let's play with it -> [10, 10, 10, 12]
parts = ip.split(".").map(int)

# 42 anyone?
echo(parts.sum())

and some more opinionated language features:

# Case-insensitive string comparison
"LeBron" ~ "lebron" = true

# Array concatenation
[1] + [2] = [1, 2]

# Reading from the stdin
echo("You typed '%s'", stdin())

Next

That's about it for the intro, we don't want to spoil the rest. You can now head over to read how to run ABS code!