The Renaissance of the Shell?
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The Renaissance of the Shell?
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Re: The Renaissance of the Shell?
#2I firmly believe that a lot of really productive work can be done with shell-based applications, and that this environment represents the true power of productive computing. With the web taking front and centre priority, we've lost something very important in terms of human/computer interaction - many would say things are 'easier', but I have to laugh at this claim whenever I see someone clicking something in a list a hundred times when it could have been something they'd solved with a little script, had they known how. Too many times I've saved someones ass by a bit of script fu, only to be granted god-like status at how quickly it was done - but if people took a month of study on, say, bash scripting or something similar, it wouldn't seem so obtuse.
Same goes for google-fu. What is happening that the arcane science of proper search semantics is not being taught kids in school? It seems to me the devolutionary effect of "ease of use computing" has wrought its anti-pattern woes over a few generations ..
Anyway, my kids learned bash before they learned how to find the Settings panel, and there is something to be said for the teenager who knows how to wrangle his OS because his Dad taught him the basics of shell-based package management, something still not quite done well in certain environments...
Re: The Renaissance of the Shell?
#3I also observe a renaissance of command line interfaces. I guess it's a trend in a similar way how the graphical user interface (in the MS Windows/OS X/X11 way) has been trendy in the 1990s/early 2000s. Remember that Apple banned the terminal from classic Mac OS. This was a declaration of war against complicated CLIs. Nowadays we experience the opposite: Microsoft is building the most modern Terminal emulator as well as many productivity tools such as Powershell but also the Linux subsystem.
Of course this is driven by commercial interests. Microsoft tries to close the gap to the rich Mac OS X development environment, which is rich because it is compatible to the Unix/Linux ecosystem.
As the author noted, many jobs are primarily terminal-based in a way like probably nobody would have believed 20 years ago. DevOps or data scientist, they both enjoy powerful CLI applications, REPL interfaces, scripting as if the "GUI movement" did not even take place.
Re: The Renaissance of the Shell?
#4It's hard to automate something with a GUI.
It is also hard to make programs interoperate if they use a GUI.
Re: The Renaissance of the Shell?
#5I firmly believe that a lot of really productive work can be done with shell-based applications, and that this environment represents the true power of productive computing. With the web taking front and centre priority, we've lost something very important in terms of human/computer interaction - many would say things are 'easier', but I have to laugh at this claim whenever I see someone clicking something in a list…
You're not really wrong on many of your points, but you look at everything from a power user/developer mindset and that's too narrow of an approach, sorry.
I.e. you should realize programming is not for everybody, not even close, so the claim that things are easier now is very much true for a lot of people out there. As such there's not much to laugh at, in fact that sounds borderline disrespectful to me.
Re: The Renaissance of the Shell?
#6I certainly hope the shell doesn't have a renaissance. Just today I was updating my dotfiles/customizing my OS, and I had to swap out several shell scripts for Python scripts because I couldn't edit shell. The scripts looked like arcane rituals, not editable code.
Re: The Renaissance of the Shell?
#7I certainly hope the shell doesn't have a renaissance. Just today I was updating my dotfiles/customizing my OS, and I had to swap out several shell scripts for Python scripts because I couldn't edit shell. The scripts looked like arcane rituals, not editable code.
Shell scripts have some idiosyncrasies sure, but at least they don't rely on significant white space.
Re: The Renaissance of the Shell?
#8It's hard to automate something with a GUI. It is also hard to make programs interoperate if they use a GUI.
It doesn't necessarily have to, though : look at plan9. IIRC GUIs respected UNIX's " everything is a file" philosophy, and thus were introspectible, modifiable and scriptable from other programs.
Looking at modern desktop Linux, I wish it had retained more of this. Unfortunately, d-bus, GObject and Wayland aren't really file-based.
Re: The Renaissance of the Shell?
#9I certainly hope the shell doesn't have a renaissance. Just today I was updating my dotfiles/customizing my OS, and I had to swap out several shell scripts for Python scripts because I couldn't edit shell. The scripts looked like arcane rituals, not editable code.
Shell scripts have some idiosyncrasies sure, but at least they don't rely on significant white space.
Not a pure shell, but Makefiles do rely on whitespace.
I never understood why so many people care about that (not to mention that python uses the curly braces as a useful syntax element for dicts & sets)
Re: The Renaissance of the Shell?
#10I also observe a renaissance of command line interfaces. I guess it's a trend in a similar way how the graphical user interface (in the MS Windows/OS X/X11 way) has been trendy in the 1990s/early 2000s. Remember that Apple banned the terminal from classic Mac OS. This was a declaration of war against complicated CLIs. Nowadays we experience the opposite: Microsoft is building the most modern Terminal emulator as well…
Question, because I wasn't a developer 20 years ago yet; were the GUI tools of "back when" wrappers around CLI tools? I get that impression with most IDE's I've worked with.