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dead languagesdead languagesPosted Jun 25, 2008 3:16 UTC (Wed) by sbishop (guest, #33061)Parent article: Hotwire: a combined terminal/GUI for GNU/Linux (Free Software Magazine)
I haven't tried Hotwire yet, but I have read every Wiki and Web page accessible from either the project home page or random Google-group postings. ;) It seems that the emphasis has largely been on the GUI<->CLI connection. That's important and could be improved, but it my mind, at least, the language being used is in much more need of attention. If you google for bash programming information, you'll get one of two things: tutorials from people whom I suspect have just finished writing assembly language tutorials, or admonitions to write anything serious in a serious programming language. We need a shell language that people *want* to use. It needs to be scalable, from one-liners to a reasonable-sized script. (Think of your typical Python or Perl script.) I hope Red Hat turns Hotwire into an ET project, but I also hope that someone puts a great deal of thought into the language issue.
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dead languages Posted Jun 25, 2008 10:26 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] Well, actually you *can* do full-blown parsing and bidirectional pipeline stuff in the shell (I've done it). However, bugs and differences between shells make it agonisingly difficult to do anything really complicated in portable shell. You could decide e.g. to just go with zsh because it's widespread, flexible, only has one consistent implementation and works everywhere useful (that's what I ended up doing) but if you're doing that you might as well go with Python or Perl anyway, as the same things are true of them.
dead languages Posted Jun 26, 2008 12:44 UTC (Thu) by mish (guest, #52694) [Link] The main language being used is python, and the default scripting would be in python (though as with the standard shell, other languages can be used in scripts, and the plan is for perl and ruby to be supported fairly natively, but that will take some time). So the idea is to go beyond bash scripting, but maintaining a level of backwards compatibility. Some relevant links: Ideas on how to do scripting (not implemented yet): http://code.google.com/p/hotwire-shell/wiki/HotwireScripting See "Running Other Languages" in this page for ruby etc support http://code.google.com/p/hotwire-shell/wiki/GettingStarte... And having an object stream pipeline rather than a text based pipeline is also a big advance from bash and similar shells. So a lot of thought is being given to language issues, with many details still to be worked out.
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