Why would that be a shame? "bc" is a mandatory POSIX command, while /bin/bash isn't (/bin/sh is the standard).

Which distro are you running? Perchance did you run the shell script in alpine Linux (docker)?

it doesn't seem to be installed on my endeavouros laptop

Debian.

There is a python3 variant in this thread [1], but if that is not "standard enough" (as someone else may have mentioned bash itself is not POSIX), this awk would also work { Warning - this awk is 1000s of times faster than the bash. So, you really probably want that sleep { and sure 100s of times faster yet may be possible. } }:

    #!/usr/bin/awk -f
    BEGIN {
      # Split on spaces so multi-byte utf8 works
      nText  = split("♥ P E A C E ♥ F O R ♥ A L L", tmp, " ")
      for (i = 0; i < nText; i++) text[i] = tmp[i + 1]
      color0 = 12; color1 = 208  # xterm-256 color cube range
      nColor = color1 - color0   # Could be a pretty gradient
      w = ENVIRON["COLUMNS"]; if (w == "") w = 80
      h = ENVIRON["LINES"];   if (h == "") h = 24
      freq = 0.2
      for (t = 0; 1; t++) {
        x     = int(w/2 + w/4*sin(t*freq) + 0.5)  # x pos ~ sine
        color = color0 + int((nColor*t)/h)%nColor # cycle colors
        ch    = text[t % nText]                   # cycle chars
        printf("%*s\033[38;5;%dm%s\033[m\n", x, "", color, ch)
        fflush()
      # system("sleep 0.1") # awk has no builtin sleep
      }
    }

As to "bug reports", the T-shirt published script also fails with LC_ALL=C for me as mentioned else-thread.

FWIW, I think ancient practice to reach for `bc` instead of `awk` or even the arithmetic built into shells often annoys. The only reason I keep `bc` installed at all is to compile Linux kernels. Someone had some patch set to Linux to eliminate this very dependency many years ago now.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48830669

Are we really at the "redditor insult" type comments stage of HN now? There is nothing wrong with saying a piece of code is broken.

Broken seems a little hyperbolic, it has an implicit dependency on a standard POSIX tool.