I have one and it’s very nice.

That’s why I included Perl, it is always there. Just don’t code as if you were in the nineties and Perl is a perfectly legitimate language, even more so for shell tasks. Bad and good doesn’t depend so much on the language but the coder.

Why not use Perl or python for scripting tasks? Bash script is terrible imo.

Fzf doesn’t need fish, though. I use it with bash.

Stable, in this context, only means, that there are no major version jumps. So, you won’t update from, say, version 3.4.9 to 4.0 if that comes out, but instead to 3.4.10, which provides stability, but no new features. It depends a lot on your usage profile, if this is important to you. In that sense, the AUR usually isn’t very stable – but that can be seen as a good thing. If it is significant, typically, you can find pinned versions, too, just as you are still able to download python 2 (not supported for years, but it’s there, stable).

Why do you assume, they had no such concern? There were seals to ensure authenticity and avoid man in the middle attacks. There were encoded messages, smoke, flags, light and sound signals. Trusted couriers, pigeons, etc …

Yeah, you’re totally right.

If you learned that today, you must have been living under a very cosy rock of blissful ignorance. This scheme is still in use even now in a wide array of poorer countries.