a while ago, i blogged about uploading files to s3 using curl and provided the solution as two functions written in bash, and basically the only feedback was “wait. you can write functions in bash?”

you can. but in reality, you probably don’t want to. the syntax for defining (and calling) bash functions is horrible. there’s a reason people genrally don’t use them. writing and using functions in amber, by comparison, is a borderline delight of sanity. if you’ve ever written a function in php or python or javascript, amber’s function syntax will feel familiar and, well, ‘normal’.

a programming language is only ever going to be as good as its standard library. try writing a c program without <string.h>, for instance . it’s not great.

amber’s standard library is not large — it’s only 24 commands, and some of those aren’t yet available in version 1.0 — but it provides a lot of the convenience functionality that we want when scripting. there’s string manipulation, array handling, some file access stuff. all of these functions are, under the hood, just bash commands, but they provide proven and convenient ways to do the things we want to do.

none of the standard library commands are covered in the official documentation. to find out what they do (or even that they exist), you need to read the source code. so, lets’ go over them here so we don’t have to do that.

in this series we’re looking at using the amber language to write scripts that transpile into bash. so far we’ve covered using shell commands and handling error cases. in this installment, we’ll be looking at control structures: loops and ifs, basically.

writing shell scripts is zero fun. the bash syntax is a mess, error handling is difficult, and any script longer than a hundred lines is basically unreadable. but we keep writing bash scripts because they’re the right tool for the job and the job must be done.

amber aims to fix this pain by being a language that gives us a sane, readable syntax that transpiles into messy bash so we don’t have to write messy bash ourselves.

this post is a four-parter that will go over the basic features of amber from the perspective of those of us who actually want to use it. we’ll start with calling shell commands and handling errors, then look at loops and if statements, the standard library of commands, and finally investigate functions.