[anthk]

Well, we are set by your "Windows philosphy", and forget NT being a VMS rehash, we would still be using the crappy W9x designs with DOS crap back and forth.

Even Risc OS seems to do better even if it doesn't have memory protection too (I think it hasn't, I didn't try it for more than a few days).

[pjmlp]

Thing is there is no "Windows philosphy" cargo cult, and I don't worship OSes nor languages, all have their plus and minus, use any of them when the situation calls for it, and it is a disservice to oneself to identify themselves to technology stacks like football club memberships given at birth.

[anthk]

Neither I am a sole Unix user; I have Risc OS open (Apache 2.0?) on an RPI to experiment something else beyond Unix/C.

But Windows it's too heavyweight, from 8 it has been a disaster. And the NT kernel+explorer can be really slim (look at ReactOS, or XP, or a debloated W7).

The problem it's that Apple and MS (and RedHat) are just selling shiny turds wasting tons of cycles to do trivial tasks.

Worse, you can't slim down your install so it behaves like a sane system for 1GB of RAM.

I can watch 720p@30FPS videos under a n270 netbook with MPV. Something even native players for WXP can't do with low level direct draw calls well enough.

The Windows > XP philosophy among RedHat and Apple it's: let bloat and crap out our OSes with unnecesary services and XML crap (and interpreted languages such as JS and C#) for the desktop until hardware vendors idolize US so the average user has to buy new crap to do the same task ever and ever.

Security? Why the fuck does Gnome 3 need JS at first? Where's Vala, where it could shine here and Mutter could get a big boost and memory leaks could be a thing of the past?

[neonsunset]

C# is a compiled language at all levels (source into bytecode, then bytecode into machine code either JIT or AOT). V8 has JIT compilation for hot paths. As a result, JS is significantly faster than the interpreted languages like Python, Ruby and Erlang/Elixir/Gleam.

[anthk]

C and Vala curbstomp JS in speed.

[neonsunset]

C is an unserious and an unusable language when alternatives are available to you. Vala is a toy to write Gnome applications.

[anthk]

No one under GTK/Gnome uses plain C, they use Glib as a wrapper. Plain ANSI C might be 'unusable' for modern UI needs, but, as I said, just have a look on WebkitGTK4. Glib everywhere, WebkitSettings are a breeze to setup.

Vala it's a toy because Miguel de Icaza went full MS with C# since Ximian. If Vala had more support from Red Hat, Gnome 4 could support Vala as the main language for it. JS? Lua and Luajit wouldb be a better choice for Mutter scripting. If you have a look on how Luakit and Vimb behave, the difference it's almost nil.

[skydhash]

While I’m mot bothered by Gnome UI design choices, I was surprised by the choice of JS for the implementation.

[DonHopkins]

Even an operating system as brain damaged as Windows still has PowerShell, which lets you easily and efficiently perform all kinds of operations, dynamically link in libraries ("cmdlets") and call them directly, call functions with typed non-string parameters, pipe live OBJECTS between code running in the SAME address space without copying and context switching and serializing and piping and deserializing everything as text.

PowerShell even has a hosting api that lets you embed it inside other applications -- try doing that with bash. At least you can do that with python!

When even lowly Windows PowerShell blows your Unix shell out of the water along so many dimensions of power, usability, learnability, maintainability, efficiency, and flexibility, you know for sure your that your Unix shell and the philosophy it rode in on totally sucks, and self imposed ignorance and delusional denial is your only defense against realizing how bankrupt the Unix Philosophy really is.

It's such a LOW BAR to lose spectacularly to, and then still try to carry the water and make excuses for the bankrupt "Unix Philosophy" cargo cult. Do better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerShell

>Pipeline

>PowerShell implements the concept of a pipeline, which enables piping the output of one cmdlet to another cmdlet as input. As with Unix pipelines, PowerShell pipelines can construct complex commands, using the | operator to connect stages. However, the PowerShell pipeline differs from Unix pipelines in that stages execute within the PowerShell runtime rather than as a set of processes coordinated by the operating system. Additionally, structured .NET objects, rather than byte streams, are passed from one stage to the next. Using objects and executing stages within the PowerShell runtime eliminates the need to serialize data structures, or to extract them by explicitly parsing text output.[47] An object can also encapsulate certain functions that work on the contained data, which become available to the recipient command for use.[48][49] For the last cmdlet in a pipeline, PowerShell automatically pipes its output object to the Out-Default cmdlet, which transforms the objects into a stream of format objects and then renders those to the screen.[50][51]

>Because all PowerShell objects are .NET objects, they share a .ToString() method, which retrieves the text representation of the data in an object. In addition, PowerShell allows formatting definitions to be specified, so the text representation of objects can be customized by choosing which data elements to display, and in what manner. However, in order to maintain backward compatibility, if an external executable is used in a pipeline, it receives a text stream representing the object, instead of directly integrating with the PowerShell type system.[52][53][54]

> Hosting

>One can also use PowerShell embedded in a management application, which uses the PowerShell runtime to implement the management functionality. For this, PowerShell provides a managed hosting API. Via the APIs, the application can instantiate a runspace (one instantiation of the PowerShell runtime), which runs in the application's process and is exposed as a Runspace object.[12] The state of the runspace is encased in a SessionState object. When the runspace is created, the Windows PowerShell runtime initializes the instantiation, including initializing the providers and enumerating the cmdlets, and updates the SessionState object accordingly. The Runspace then must be opened for either synchronous processing or asynchronous processing. After that it can be used to execute commands. [...]

[anthk]

9front it's the truest Unix philosophy since Unix v6. It makes it much better. Proper devices and network connections as files, plus namespaces and aux/listen plus friends. It makes AWK better than Perl and rc it's much simpler without the bullshit of sh. You only have functions, not aliases, and the syntax it's much saner.

On Powershell/C#, TCL/Tk might not be as powerful but it works under Windows XP with IronTCL unlike MS' own and newest C# implementations ( >= 4.5). Double irony there. TCL can help to write some useful software such as a Gopher /Gemini client with embedded TLS support. And the resource usage will still be far lower.

On embedding, TCL wins here, hands down. It's everywhere.

And JimTCL can run under a potato.

[pjmlp]

If we forget that the authors moved on into Inferno and Limbo, while re-doing all the Plan 9 decisions they had to rollback like Alef as main userspace language.

[anthk]

9front lives today and Inferno can run on top it perfectly well.

Golang it's almost the byproduct of Limbo, and we owe tons of legacy or 9front's C compilers into Golang too.

[anthk]

>Because all PowerShell objects are .NET objects, they share a .ToString() method,

Congrats, PSH, you did what TCL did ~30 years ago, but worse. With TCL everything it's a string, even numbers. Yes, it sucks you need to [ eval ] math operations, but well, the advantages outnumber the quirks.

If you came from Lisp, you will be at home in the spot. Use the l* functions as you were doing the same with Lisp lists, but without juggling with car, cdr, caar, cddr and so on.

And there's Expect which is utterly underrated.

Yes, I hate upvar sometimes, but with namespaces you can almost avoid that issue.

On TCL done for serious stuff... if people have been using Excel with millions of rows for covid patients and census, TCL/Tk with SQLite would outperform these by a huge margin.

[DonHopkins]

PowerShell is the opposite of TCL and bash. You pass objects directly, NOT strings. I have no idea what you're trying to say. And yes I've written and shipped and open sourced shitloads of TCL/Tk.

https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/micropol...

[anthk]

Objects are not my thing, they are just good for Inform6 as a Z-Machine game maps really well with OOP because a text adventure based on events tied to attributes it's ideal.

With strings and lists the complexity goes away.

[DonHopkins]

Now you're making even less sense than before, with incoherent grammar and random buzzwords, which is an impressive leap. I don't think "your thing", whatever that is, has any bearing on this conversation. Are you an LLM?

I played the original Zork on MIT-DM, and read the original source code written in MDL, which is essentially Lisp with angled brackets and data types, and it's neither object nor text oriented, so I have no idea what point you're trying to make about its descendent ZIL, because it makes no sense and has no bearing on this discussion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31846457

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42771971

You're arguing with a well vetted factually correct evidence based wikipedia page, so if you disagree, go try to edit it, and see how long your hallucinations and vandalisms last without citations to reality or coherent sentences.

At least my code doesn't shit its pants when you pass it a filename with a space in it.

[anthk]

I am not an LLM. I am talking about Inform6, an OOP language born in the 90's where they created games far more powerful than the Infocom ones. If6 maps pretty well to MDL. Both compile to ZMachine games, but if6 it's far easier.

On games, have a look on Anchorhead, Spider and Web, Curses, Jigsaw... in these kind of games OOP has tons of sense.

https://www.ifwiki.org/Inform_6

Get the Inform Beggnner's Guide and you'll see an approach far easier than MDL and ZIL.