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by coldtea 3366 days ago
>These days shell is a really important tool in my toolkit, and I can see just how much some of my colleagues are held back by not knowing it.

Perhaps, but the shell is still a badly accrued (more than designed) set of options.
2 comments
falcolas 3366 days ago
Well, on the plus side of that, accrued means they're actually useful, as opposed to "designer through they would be useful".

I wouldn't mind a better shell, but I'm not going to throw out my current shell for the lack of a better shell.

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jwhite 3366 days ago
Yes, totally agree. But it offers something different to say Python, as the video points out. Some things are more compact in shell than in Python, because it's not the same sort of programming language as Python. And I reach for Python as well, when it's the right tool.
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coldtea 3366 days ago
True. I'm not against a DSL for working with CLI programs, pipes, output streams, processes, etc. Just that the shell as we know it is not the optimal (or even close to optimal) example of that.

Something like ZSH and the modern Fish shell showed how much traditional shells can improve, but we also need some better primitives, and more controlled experience.

Oh, and they should NOT be based on emulating 40+ year old teletypes anymore, except as part of a "legacy" mode.

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catdog 3366 days ago
Totally agree, the concept is nice and really useful but its implementation is for a large part really a big pile of fragile and confusing hacks. Most of the power comes of powerful tools like find, sed, awk (being a programming language on its own), etc. The language gluing them together is nicely compact but apart from that very disappointing. Also the everything is a string approach has its limitations. A python script may sometimes be longer but a lot less riddled with annoying corner cases.
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