I really miss VMS. Adding a command wasn't just simply a matter of throwing an executable on the path, it had to be declared, with two options: One was to declare a command that had its own argument parsing or the better option, there was a way of doing external configuration of the arguments using (iirc) a .cld file which provided a way of specifying all the arguments and options for the command in a straightforward way. I did this for all the TeX programs around 1990 (I think this might have been the first TeX version which didn't use separate binaries for iniTeX vs TeX). It was nice because the OS automatically managed things like abbreviations so you only needed to type as much of a verbose command or option as was necessary for it to be unique. So while the command might have been `DIRECTORY /FULL` one could just type `DIR /FU` to get the same result. The VMS help system was also fantastic and allowed for easy browsing of available commands and their instructions in a way that man+apropos only approximates (not to mention that the tradition of using relatively verbose but understandable commands and options made it supremely usable.
A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
171–180 of 286 posts
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
PowerShell takes the UNIX philosophy, cranks it up to 11, and makes commands trivially discoverable.
There are things that powershell does well, but I wouldn't say that it's really all that unixey. It relies far too heavily for the user to have an understanding of the windows object model, which frankly a lot of sysadmins don't have and refuse to learn. In unices the pipeline is just that, a way to send a stream of bytes from one place to another. In pwsh it's more complicated than that since it passes an object alo…
Thats nonsense really.
What windows object model ???
Your 'simple' pipeline becomes hard core once you take into account all other things you require like grep, awk, sed, xargs, mount etc. Hack, even basic boolean stuff is from another dimension with executables like `[` or `true/false` (yeah, I know mostly builtin nowdays)
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#173Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For beginners it's a nightmare I've taught undergraduate students some basic shell use for being able to compile their C programs. It's not really that bad. You have them use bash and you teach them some basic syntax and a few shell-usable programs, including man. You tell them that there is a lot of things the shell can do that we won't be discussing, so they have to be careful not use arbitrary symbols and to dou…
> I then tell them to check with "echo $SHELL" if they're on another system than the one we are working on, and if they don't see "/bin/bash" or "/usr/bin/bash" then they should ask someone for help. Some systems will be weird. EG my default shell is bash, but my interactive shell for all my terminal emulators is fish. So "echo $SHELL" returns "/bin/bash", even from fish. Of course I know this, I set it up this way d…
Hmm... interesting. But - echo $SHELL should tell you what the current shell is, not what the default shell is.
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
should't the first one be "network as last word"?
Indeed. My bad.
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Which good documentation do you recommend?
Poweshell in depth, or in month of launches.
But, experience is more important. Simply do everything in posh, even if there is a handy gui. After a few months you are closer to pro then with any books.
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue with git is that no matter how well documented, the user interface is horribly designed. For starters, how many different things does "git checkout" do, and how many of them actually reflect an intuitive meaning of "checking out" ?
> the user interface is horribly designed I see this type of remark against git quite often on HN and I think it's exaggerated. I agree some of the porcelain are misleading and overloaded as convenience functions such as checkout, however a decent chunk of it is inline with the underlying data structure. Nothing is perfect, and git is pretty damn good - horribly designed? no, could do with some breaking porcelain re-…
The git UI is absolutely horribly designed, as demonstrated by the mercurial or darcs UIs which, while completely different, were significantly easier to discover, intuit and remember.
> git is pretty damn good
UI-wise, it really is not.
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#178Pretty much each point raised in this post(?) are correct, current and relevant even 26 years later. POSIX is a monolith and really deserves to be improved. It's been around forever, yes. It will probably keep on being around forever, yes. Take the tar command (please!), which is already a nightmare where lower-case `a' means "check first" and upper-case `A' means "delete all my disk files without asking" (or somethi…
One of my pet-peeves on a similar note is the inconsistencies between different ssh commands on if it's -p or -P that signifies the target port. Apart from the obvious compatibility and legacy factor, I think a major reason is that by the time someone has both enough knowledge and experience to formulate a proper solution and have felt the pain-points, they're already deep enough that they've internalized that this i…
Argh yes, scp -P vs ssh -p. I get bitten by this regularly as we have something running on a non-standard port.
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#179> One can only conclude that the makers of Unix held, and still hold, the ordinary computer user in total contempt, and this viewpoint seems to me to be mirrored in the attitudes of the people who are inflicting this awful system on the rest of us. Does Unix's enormously steep learning curve have any function other than to deter the faint-hearted, those who may want to use computers without necessarily dedicating the…
> but it's likely that the unixification of computing has contributed to this divide.
It took a long time until a meaningful part of humanity got access to computers. The fraction that had access to timeshared machines via serial terminals was tiny.
In the age of the PET, the Apple II, the C64, it was usual to boot up your home computer and be greeted by a BASIC prompt (REPL, if you allow me). It was an immediate introduction to programming - a language was there, built into the computer's firmware, and you could just start writing code one second after powering the thing up. You could write programs that looked comparable to what you could buy at a store or type in from a magazine.
CP/M and then MS/DOS were a bit different. You were dropped into an OS shell rather than a programming environment. In order to program, you needed to explicitly start an interpreter or a text editor. You still could write programs that looked like professional apps on the platform, but you had to get a language, which was not usually provided.
Then the GUIs came. Now, in order to write programs for Windows, or the Mac (oh boy!), or anything else graphical, you needed to get developer tools. Microsoft's came in a crate. A Hello World app would be hundreds of lines. In order to make something useful that looked decent, you'd need to learn a lot. By then, most timeshared system users were left behind, as terminals couldn't cope with user expectations.
What was once a small crack is now a vast chasm.
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
They made a rather strange o2 laptop that never made it to production. A number of legendary companies with great potential misstepped, GRiD, Blackberry, Be, MasPar, Thinking Machines, GO corp, Intergraph, heck go back to the Evans & Sutherland LDS-1 in 1969 or when BBN decided not to get into hardware after making the first internet hardware ever, the IMP. Or how about how SRI fumbled the ball after Englebarts work…
Yeah, I saw the Indy-laptop once during a demo in Hollywood .. was definitely a clunky pile of junk. You're right about that golfing handshake.
Sgi hardware wasn't that great from about o2 onwards. I used a lot of those machines and they were kinda dogs