Overview

In order to attain it's goals, Hush takes great inspiration in Lua, the industry proven embedded scripting language. If you're familiar with Lua, you'll notice that, except for the shell capabilities, Hush feels a lot like a simplified version of it.

As such, Hush provides:

  • Static scoping
  • Strong dynamic typing
  • Garbage collection
  • First class functions
  • Good support for functional programming
  • Basic support for object oriented programming
  • First class shell capabilities

While being somewhat similar to scripting languages like Lua, Python and Ruby, even though it is much simpler than those, Hush strives to feel pretty much like Bash when it comes to shell capabilities. There are only minor syntax differences regarding invoking and interconnecting external programs, and therefore you won't have to learn all the shell syntax again.

But while most shell and even generic purpose script languages focus a lot on flexibility, Hush favors robustness, which may come at cost of some flexibility. As such, the language will make it's best to empower the programmer to write robust scripts that work diverse scenarios. It does so by preventing, by design, whole classes of bugs that often occur in shell scripts.

Being a shell script language, the typical use cases for Hush are operating systems instrumenting and infrastructure programming. In practice, Hush should be a good fit in any scenario where the heavy lifting is done by external programs, and you just need to put them to work together.