So, what in your opinion constitutes a "real language", and why?

dec0dedab0de · on Sept 19, 2019

a "real language" would be any programming language that is primarily designed and presented as a programming language.

jascii · on Sept 19, 2019

Nice recursive definition..

The practice of programming in shell languages was well established when Bash was designed and Bash was definitely designed with that use in mind. So by your definition Bash is a "real" programming language.

Lisp on the other hand, was much more designed as a system and formal notation to reason about certain classes of logic problems.. So, Lisp is not a "real" language?

dec0dedab0de · on Sept 20, 2019

Bash is primarily a shell, it even has the word shell in its full name.

jascii · on Sept 20, 2019

And a shell can't be a real language? https://scsh.net/

dec0dedab0de · on Sept 20, 2019

a shell can't be a real language?

No, it can not.

jigglesniggle · on Sept 20, 2019

By "programming language" he probably means something that has robust flow control mechanisms and metaprogramming facilities.

You can definitely tell there's a different "feel" to bash and Tcl, Python, Perl, Go, etc, yes? Shell languages basically evolved out of batch processing languages that were meant to only run programs in sequence and it shows.