I still work with bash scripts from fish (to interoperate with bash users), but it’s more like how I use python: the interpreter is specified either in the shebang or explicitly on the cli command invoking the script. It works quite well actually
I’ve been all over the place tech-wise for at least 15 years now and I keep coming back to debian. Simple, reliable, and impressively enshittification-proof. I was on team xfce but got hooked on i3wm at some point and haven’t seen fit to look back.
I use Sublime for editor - it’s not free which I normally can’t tolerate but it has most of the functionality of vscode without being on the old corporate enshittification slide (and styles on vscode by feeling snappier too)
I’m not sure if this is the right setting for technical discussion, but as a relative elder of computing I’d like to answer the question in the image earnestly. There’s a few factors squeezing the practicality out of this for almost all applications: processor architectures (like all of them these days) make operating on packed characters take more operations than 8 bit characters so there’s a speed tradeoff (especially considering cache and pipelining). Computers these days are built to handle extremely memory demanding video and 3d workloads and memory usage of text data is basically a blip in comparison. When it comes to actual storage and not in-memory representation, compression algorithms typically perform better than just packing each character into fewer bits. You’d need to be in a pretty specific niche for this technique to come in handy again, for better or for worse