It’s no secret I’ve been spending some time having fun with ABS, a programming language with a terse and coincise syntax that can simplify working with shell commands.

A few weeks ago I needed to remove a file from all of Namshi’s private GitHub repositories, and did so with an ABS script.

Let’s get to it!

A few weeks ago the ABS team managed to pull together a new minor release of the language, 1.2.0, which includes loads of interesting features — let’s get to them!

Fresh new release of the ABS programming language, bringing more syntax you should be familiar with, inspired both by Bash and Python.

This release includes 8 new features and 2 bugfixes, let’s discover them together!

While getting ready for 1.0.0, we merged some changes that created a very funny behaviour:

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null == null # false

If you’re wondering what the problem is, well, when we evaluate null we always create a new Null object rather than re-using one (a-la singleton), so when you end up comparing those 2 objects…well, they’re different.

This was a trivial fix and we’ve already released 1.0.2 to address the issue. As usual:

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bash <(curl https://www.abs-lang.org/installer.sh)

…and start scripting like it’s 2019!

Eventually, the time has come: ABS 1.0.0 is finally out!

This wraps up weeks of work since I started the project a little over a month ago, and gives you a fairly stable release with all of the “must” features I originally wanted to introduce in the language.

This was a fairly quick and informative read, one that maybe dosn’t fully justify its price, currently trending at around $30 from Amazon.

At the end of the day, though, I’m happy with my choice and certainly cannot complain, as the book gave me a couple interesting ideas / perspectives that I would have missed otherwise — and I was pretty excited to read Brendan Burns‘ take, one of Kubernetes’ fathers, on distributed systems.

Thanks to a few contributions, I got around to releasing another preview of ABS, the dynamic and modern language for shell scripting.

Boy, what a book!

This goes right into the list of books I would have wanted to read 10 years ago: a masterpiece on programming languages, with the author showcasing an excellent ability to write couple with extremely exhaustive — but never boring — content.

Long story short, the interpreter book should definitely be on your 2019 reading list unless you’ve already read it. If that’s the case, give the book another try, it’s probably worth it.

I just released the preview-3 version of ABS, a terse, pragmatic scripting alternative to Bash. This release is geared towards cleaning up bugs before 1.0, so I thought I’d spend some time going through the changes.

These days I got some spare time to work on the 2nd preview release of ABS, with loads of interesting features making into this version.