Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

user.eng.umd.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 286 posts

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#121

Post by _fullpint »

tcbawo wrote: post #114
ptero wrote: post #89

Those articles from mid-1990s are great to read; they are both funny and informative. Even as many of the points they make are still valid today, even more valuable is the ability to look at succeesses or failures with 20+ years of hindsight. I feel the pain of the user in this particular case. But I also understand the frustration of the people who wanted to write their own smaller programs with less restrictions th…

A similar argument has also been made about JavaScript. When it comes to market share I guess most users don't care how elegant the solution is under the hood.

We see it all the time with feature driven development. Users in general always want more.

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#122

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #107
Joker_vD wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GUIs have "discoverability" and "affordances". I've haven't read a single help file for any GUI application in 20 years (including apps on Windows, Linux, and Android) and somehow I can navigate and use them perfectly fine. That's simply impossible with CLIs, you need at least read a "How to Get Started Immediately" note.

PowerShell does an okay job at command line discoverability in my experience. When using a cmdlet I'll think "I hope there's an argument for X" and then I can hit tab after '-' and cycle through all the available arguments. As another post mentioned, this unfortunately falls down a bit with cmdlet names themselves because they start with the verb instead of the noun: Get- isn't helpful the way NetAdapter- would be.

Fish is similar in this way, if you're not on Windows and thus don't have access to PowerShell.

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#123

Post by majkinetor »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #107
Joker_vD wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GUIs have "discoverability" and "affordances". I've haven't read a single help file for any GUI application in 20 years (including apps on Windows, Linux, and Android) and somehow I can navigate and use them perfectly fine. That's simply impossible with CLIs, you need at least read a "How to Get Started Immediately" note.

PowerShell does an okay job at command line discoverability in my experience. When using a cmdlet I'll think "I hope there's an argument for X" and then I can hit tab after '-' and cycle through all the available arguments. As another post mentioned, this unfortunately falls down a bit with cmdlet names themselves because they start with the verb instead of the noun: Get- isn't helpful the way NetAdapter- would be.

Cycling tabs is not effective. PSreadline supports CTRL+SPACE completition - just type - and then CTRL+SPACE and it will show menu with ALL arguments. The same works if you start argument (i.e. -P shows all params starting with P)

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#124

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

3np wrote: post #119
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I optimistically hope a not-too-future (within 10y?) major version update of Windows is in reality a *nix distribution. I very much hope you are wrong, as this will signal the death of personal computing.

Why so? Imagine the WSL will eventually molding into an LSW. The end-user experience needn't be affected apart from the more technical power-users.

Because frankly I think the Linux Desktop as it exists is incompatible with a good personal computing platform. I have rambled on at quite some length about this elsewhere on HN. Were Windows to become just another cobbled-together leaky abstraction of a desktop on top of Linux, it would suffer from all of the same problems.

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#125

Post by chungus_khan »

mwcampbell wrote: post #104
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is about Unix v.s. VMS, not Windows v.s. Linux.

That's true. Still, I think cheph is right to point out that the situation has changed since then. I honestly got so caught up in the rhetoric of the OP that I had forgotten this for a moment.

In particular, we now download whatever software tools we like from this lovely internet thing, so it's less of a concern what programming environment the OS bundles by default.

Back then your choices on UNIX were to either accept whatever your vendor included (which would mostly be C), or buy a disk set of some other tools and hope they actually worked on your machine.

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#126

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #122
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PowerShell does an okay job at command line discoverability in my experience. When using a cmdlet I'll think "I hope there's an argument for X" and then I can hit tab after '-' and cycle through all the available arguments. As another post mentioned, this unfortunately falls down a bit with cmdlet names themselves because they start with the verb instead of the noun: Get- isn't helpful the way NetAdapter- would be.

Fish is similar in this way, if you're not on Windows and thus don't have access to PowerShell.

PowerShell is available for Linux.

There's also Elvish, Nushell, and a few other attempts in a similar vein.

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#127

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

jcranmer wrote: post #116
ACS_Solver wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't find `man git` to be bad at all. Git is complex, and its man pages do the right thing by referring to sources for basics info like giteveryday, and referring to in-depth guides as well. Individual man pages are also pretty good, see `man git-rebase`. It starts with an overall explanation of what rebase does, with examples, and then covers configuration options and flags. It's a lot of stuff, but it's pretty g…

> I don't find `man git` to be bad at all. Git is complex, and its man pages do the right thing by referring to sources for basics info like giteveryday, and referring to in-depth guides as well. Individual man pages are also pretty good, see `man git-rebase`. It starts with an overall explanation of what rebase does, with examples, and then covers configuration options and flags. It's a lot of stuff, but it's pretty…

Git's documentation tends to tell you how it does what it does, without telling you what it's trying to accomplish. It's the equivalent of the classic beginner comment:

a += 5; // Add 5 to a

Entirely accurate, and totally useless.

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#128

Post by majkinetor »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #111
andi999 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How to discover commands?

Powershell pretty much has universal tab-complete. Typing a command, '-', and repeatedly hitting tab will cycle through all available arguments for that command, and arguments will be quite consistent between commands. But you can also tab complete variable names and the commands themselves. Discovering the cmdlets is not as trivial as it could be, because they are named verb-first instead of noun first. Get- is not…

> Discovering the cmdlets is not as trivial as it could be, because they are named verb-first instead of noun first

Irrelevant. Use

    Get-Command *network    #network anywhere in noun
    gcm *-network*          #network as first word in noun
PowerShell has it all, its just that people don't bother to learn it.

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#129

Post by majkinetor »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #122
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PowerShell does an okay job at command line discoverability in my experience. When using a cmdlet I'll think "I hope there's an argument for X" and then I can hit tab after '-' and cycle through all the available arguments. As another post mentioned, this unfortunately falls down a bit with cmdlet names themselves because they start with the verb instead of the noun: Get- isn't helpful the way NetAdapter- would be.

Fish is similar in this way, if you're not on Windows and thus don't have access to PowerShell.

PowerShell is besides Linux also available on Unix.
Post reply on HN