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Keep dreaming...Keep dreaming...Posted Dec 10, 2011 7:18 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)In reply to: Keep dreaming... by khim Parent article: Evolution of shells in Linux (developerWorks)
Yeah, yeah. .NET is just a rehash of old LISP machines, everything has already been invented in 1969, Lennart is an agent of Microsoft and we kids should get out of your lawn.
Nothing had ever came close to PowerShell in functionality and usability for system shells. And no, old elisp shells or Rexx scripts ARE NOT the answer. They don't offer the two most powerful features of PowerShell: introspection and structured pipelines.
>It's more powerful but it's more complex, too. You may as well say that emacs prompt is more powerful then bash - and you'll be right. But it only helps you if you want to want in "Emacs OS". When you need to interact with a real world it's more complex then bash or zsh because it needs to do what bash/zsh are doing and it needs to do it in a way which makes it possible to easily do things in it's own world.
Sorry, but PowerShell can do ANYTHING bash can do. Without exceptions. Some things might be more clumsy than in bash - because PowerShell is not bash and things are done differently there.
And PowerShell even beats bash at its own game! PowerShell integration with git is much nicer than in bash: https://github.com/dahlbyk/posh-git - and achieves the similar functionality in a fraction of lines of code. A few screenshots can be seen here: http://markembling.info/2010/03/git-powershell-revisited
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It does not matter... Posted Dec 10, 2011 8:41 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Nothing had ever came close to PowerShell in functionality and usability for system shells. And no, old elisp shells or Rexx scripts ARE NOT the answer. They don't offer the two most powerful features of PowerShell: introspection and structured pipelines. They do offer introspection and as for "structured pipelines"... this is only important if you want to pretend you are replacing "shell proper". Sorry, but PowerShell can do ANYTHING bash can do. Without exceptions. So what? Any turing-complete language with support for fork/exec (or CheateProcess on Windows) can do the same. Some things might be more clumsy than in bash - because PowerShell is not bash and things are done differently there. And that's the point: PowerShell can not replace bash so bash will survive while PowerShell will die (or at least will be relegated for niche work). If you don't like LISP Machines analogue then I have another for you: Space Shuttle. This extremely expensive program was invented to replace old rockets: Atlas, Delta, Saturn, etc. Just like PowerShell it promised the world and delivered very little¹. After all the hype and all the expenses it was only able to replace few of them - the ones which were forcibly killed to "open the road for the future". Today Space Shuttle is history and in it's place is huge glaring void - while people who were sensible enough to continue to use "old school" tools (Delta, Proton, Soyuz, etc) are still around and doing what Space Shuttle was supposed to do. PowerShell integration with git is much nicer than in bash: https://github.com/dahlbyk/posh-git - and achieves the similar functionality in a fraction of lines of code. It does not matter how many lines of code it requires. The same story as with Space Shuttle: sunk costs. When people try to justify Space Shuttle craze they compare development costs of Saturn V² and Space Shuttle - but this is completely wrong: it was not possible to get money spent on Saturn V back, thus you need to compare ongoing costs of Saturn V with new development costs of Space Shuttle - and there are no comparison. CMD/Bash is here, it's not goes away so program will need to support it anyhow. This means all additional developments (things like cmdlets) should be counted extra. ¹) Well, one nice property of this stupidity was the fact that they managed to convince USSR to waste a lot of resources for the mirror project - and if this was the goal then the project can be considered success. ²) Why Saturn? Well, alternative for Space Shuttle idiocy was continuation of Saturn program so it's only natural to compare Space Shuttle to Saturn.
It does not matter... Posted Dec 10, 2011 13:15 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
the shuttle was also an attempt to 'greenify' space travel, by making things reusable.
It does not matter... Posted Dec 11, 2011 1:03 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
>They do offer introspection and as for "structured pipelines"... this is only important if you want to pretend you are replacing "shell proper".
Please show me how I can tab-complete SQL queries in any elisp shell. I'd like to be able to at least complete all table names in all contexts.
PowerShell is freakingly powerful in that regard - I already use it instead of psql shell to work with Postgres databases. Mostly because autocompletion in posh based on simple introspection is miles ahead of what's present in psql.
And that says something.
>If you don't like LISP Machines analogue then I have another for you: Space Shuttle
Yup. It's funny because bash is very much like Space Shuttle: it's old, it's expensive to use (bash hell scripts are not easy to write), it's prone to crashes, etc. The only reason it's used is because of a sunken costs of tons of hell scripts.
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