Looking at the example

Why does the generated bash look like that? Is this more safe somehow than a more straighforward bash if or does it just generate needlessly complicated bash?

Late to the party. Idris had a bash backend (i.e. you could compile Idris to bash), and it’s already bit rotted with new Idris versions.

I hope the language is at least as cool as Idris.

Just learn Bash lol

when people have too much free time

Compiling to bash seems awesome, but on the other hand I don’t think anyone other than the person who wrote it in amber will run a bash file that looks like machine-generated gibberish on their machine.

Cool to see that after Cotowali was sadly abandoned due to lack of funding. Please, fund the FOSS projects you use!

Why not compile it to sh though.

Why not write… Bash?

There’s a joke here but I’m not clever enough to make it.

As a long-time bash, awk and sed scripter who knows he’ll probably get downvoted into oblivion for this my recommendation: learn PowerShell

It’s open-source and completely cross-platform - I use it on Macs, Linux and Windows machines - and you don’t know what you’re missing until you try a fully objected-oriented scripting language and shell. No more parsing text, built-in support for scalars, arrays, hash maps/associative arrays, and more complex types like version numbers, IP addresses, synchronized dictionaries and basically anything available in .Net. Read and write csv, json and xml natively and simply. Built-in support for regular expressions throughout, web service calls, remote script execution, and parallel and asynchronous jobs and lots and lots of libraries for all kinds of things.

Seriously, I know its popular and often-deserved to hate on Microsoft but PowerShell is a kick-ass, cross-platform, open-source, modern shell done right, even if it does have a dumb name imo. Once you start learning it you won’t want to go back to any other.