[munch117]

You shouldn't read too much into the PowerShell story. Creating your own programming language is in most cases a frivolous vanity project. Spending company resources on your own frivolous vanity projects is the sort of thing that can get you fired.

[sterlind]

! I disagree.

CMD badly needed replacing. MS needed a new shell language. A functional company would connect people with a passion for X with the resources to achieve X, if X has a chance of helping the company.

Windows Terminal and WSL show how far MS has come from the PS days.

(Disclaimer: I work for MS)

[13of40]

The way I remember it, the need for a new shell language for system administration was something that lots of people in Windows Server were trying to solve. Ballmer talked about it, we had a push to add a handful of new command line tools (like tasklist.exe I think) that you could use under CMD, and there was a proof of concept where MMC could be used to output some kind of macro language when users did things in the UI. PowerShell was the thing that eventually won, and I think it was largely because it stood on the shoulders of .Net so had a ton of capability right out of the gate. (And TBH, I think it's a little bit weird that we have this mythos today where Snover sat down at his computer one morning and invented it out of thin air, when even the v1 feature team had something like 30 engineers and PMs on it.)

[skissane]

> CMD badly needed replacing

CMD is nasty but there are lots of little ways in which it could have been improved. For example, provide an option to disable that useless "Terminate batch job (Y/N)?" prompt.

I wish Microsoft would open-source CMD.EXE. I dislike how slow PowerShell is (especially its startup). Maybe nobody at Microsoft cares about CMD.EXE enough to fix those long-standing little annoyances like the above, but if it was open-source other people out there would.

Also, I wonder why nobody ever seemed to have thought of integrating CSCRIPT into CMD, so that you could have seamlessly mixed VBScript (or other WSH languages) into batch files.

[londons_explore]

I think the smart move would have been to make an official port of bash...

[jrockway]

Some experimentation in that space is probably a good thing. Bash is familiar, but it's far from perfect. In terms of executing programs, it gets the critical functionality down pretty well; readline-based editing, variables, aliases, pipes, IO redirects, background process management, etc.

In terms of being a programming language, I always regret when I use it. I recently had a minor heart attack when I realized that our CI was green when tests were failing; deep down in some shell script, someone forgot to turn on "pipefail" and the shell linter to check for that was misconfigured, and so the CI command that piped output to a logfile failed, but the log file was written OK, so "exit 0".

In terms of interactive poking around at a computer, I never really liked the UNIX philosophy here. I run a terminal emulator, which connects to a remote server over SSH, which is running a terminal multiplexer, which is running bash, which then runs my programs. None of these things know anything about each other. The UNIX way!!! The end result is total jank and some useful features are completely impossible to implement. The various shells running under the multiplexer overwrite each other's history. The terminal multiplexer can't give the terminal emulator its scrollback buffer. The shell history is specific to the machine that the shell is running on, not the machine that the terminal is running on. Echoing the character you just typed involves two TCP round trips! It's so bad, guys.

For that reason, I totally see the desire to re-engineer this space. There are a lot of improvements to be mad. Powershell is an interesting attempt. It doesn't solve any of my problems, though, and I personally don't enjoy using it. It's verbose and unergonomic, and still not a good programming language for making stuff happen. Windows is missing the glue ecosystem of things like "grep", "sed", "curl", etc., which make matters worse. (Powershell provides some of those things as cmdlets, but the "curl" one opens up IE to make you click something, and weird stuff like that.) It's nice that someone tried to make a new thing. I personally think it's worse than everything else out there.

TL;DR: "we've always used bash" leaves a lot to be desired. It's fine. But if someone says they can do better, I completely agree.

[skissane]

> The various shells running under the multiplexer overwrite each other's history.

GitHub seems to have umpteen different variations on "store the shell history in a SQLite database": https://github.com/thenewwazoo/bash-history-sqlite https://github.com/trengrj/recent https://github.com/andmarios/bashistdb https://github.com/digitalist/bash_database_history https://github.com/quitesimpleorg/hs9001 https://github.com/hinzundcode/termmon https://github.com/fvichot/hisql https://github.com/bcsgh/bash_history_db https://github.com/jcsalterego/historian

This seems a popular enough idea, I wonder why it hasn't just added to Readline/libedit/etc? (Would the maintainers of those packages agree to add such an idea to them?)

> The shell history is specific to the machine that the shell is running on, not the machine that the terminal is running on

Once you've got the idea of shell history in sqlite – why not have a (per-user) daemon which exposes that history, some RPC protocol over a Unix domain socket, with the name of the socket in an environment variable? Then you can forward that socket over SSH? Again, something that could go in readline/libedit/etc, if their maintainers could agree to it.

> The terminal multiplexer can't give the terminal emulator its scrollback buffer.

Someone needs to come up with a new protocol here, instead of just pretending we are all still using physical VT series terminals over serial lines? The biggest problem with introducing any such protocol would be getting everyone to agree to adopt it. One could make patches for a few different terminal multiplexers and emulators, but would the maintainers accept them?

[jrockway]

My thought is to burn it all down. It's my very-background side project to do this; I have also seen a few startups trying it out. (My theory is that developers won't pay for tools, so I wouldn't start a company to do it. A few people use IntelliJ or whatever, that's about it. They're not going to buy a commercial ssh daemon and terminal emulator.)

I will say that one should be wary of combining 3d graphics and font rendering and designing a programming language in the same project, at least if you want to get it done in less than 10 years. (I did talk myself out of writing a text editor, at least. Not touching that one.)

Like I said, very backgroundy. I don't have a good programming language spec. I do have text and UI elements that can be rendered at 360fps. (Yup, I have a 360Hz monitor. If you do things right, the lack of latency is frightening. It's like that "perfectly level" floor from Rick & Morty. But it is hard work to render a UI 360 times a second, especially when you're not using C++. Sigh!)

[skissane]

> My thought is to burn it all down

I have the exact same thought. I've been working on it, on-and-off, for years. I remember starting out when our son was a baby, and he's 9 now, and I still haven't got very far. Plus, now we've got two kids, and they are older, I have far less time to muck around with this stuff than I used to.

What I've realised after a while – "burn it all down" is unlikely to produce much results. I mean, if it is all just for fun (which is kind of all it is for me now), it doesn't really matter. But if one is hoping to make an impact in the real world, small incremental improvements building on pre-existing work are far more likely to do that than starting it all over from scratch, as tempting as that is.

> I will say that one should be wary of combining 3d graphics and font rendering and designing a programming language in the same project, at least if you want to get it done in less than 10 years. (I did talk myself out of writing a text editor, at least. Not touching that one.)

My priorities are somewhat different from yours. Own programming language? Yup, been through a few of those (every now and again I get fed up with it all and restart from scratch). 3D graphics? Well, I planned on having 2D graphics, never got very far with that, didn't even think of 3D. Mostly have just stuck to text mode, at one point I had my own incomplete clone of curses written in a mixture of my own programming language and Java (this was before I decided to abandon the JVM as a substrate and rewrite my own language in C–I started redoing my curses clone in C–why didn't I just use ncurses or whatever?–but it is very unfinished, never got anywhere near as far as my Java attempt did), also HTML to render in the browser.

But a text editor? Yeah, did that. Also, somewhat bizarrely, the text editor I wrote was a line editor (as in ed, ex, edlin, etc). Never actually used it that much for editing text. I meant to write a full-screen interface for it too (retracing the historical evolution from ex to vi), just have never got around to it.

> I don't have a good programming language spec

One thing I learned years ago – unless you love writing specs, they are a bit of a waste of time for this kind of stuff. Write your language first, create the spec later. Even for serious languages like Java, that's actually what happened (from what I understand)–the implementation of the language and the runtime was already several years old before they started writing the specs for them.

[hughw]

Maybe that's how we got WSL

[munch117]

I didn't say that this project in particular was a vanity project. Just that when someone comes to you with a project and says "I'm going to solve our problems by using this new programming language that I'm in the process of inventing", then some skepticism is not unwarranted.

In hindsight, this particular one may be the best thing since sliced bread. But that's survivorship bias.