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A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

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

#211

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #191
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linux is considered a walled garden? Really? Kinda, yeah. At least in the Desktop space it seems like it desperately wants to be and Canonical in particular works to push it in that direction. For instance, it is highly discouraged to install software from outside your distro's repository.

Talking about Canonical (which advocates Snaps as a supplement to the distro's repo) and "it is highly discouraged to install software from outside your distro's repository" in the same breath is rather odd. As is thinking that Linux of all OSes is in any way a walled garden.

Snap is very canonical centric. You cannot set up your own snap store, automatic updates are mandatory, etc. It's is for all intents and purposes a second Ubuntu repo with even stricter control.

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

#213

Post by [deleted] »

laksdjfkasljdf wrote: post #207
dhosek wrote: post #171

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…

never understood why so many people complain about the short commands, but nobody contributes a central list of aliases with verbose names to them. alias copy_files_from_one_place_to_another=cp this tells me short names aren't a problem to begin with. And everyone would have the same discoverability problems with longer ones.

[deleted]

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

#214

Post by dhosek »

laksdjfkasljdf wrote: post #207
dhosek wrote: post #171

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…

never understood why so many people complain about the short commands, but nobody contributes a central list of aliases with verbose names to them. alias copy_files_from_one_place_to_another=cp this tells me short names aren't a problem to begin with. And everyone would have the same discoverability problems with longer ones.

Verbose is a relative thing. `copy` is an intuitive name, `cp` not so much. Likewise, it's a lot easier to remember how to do something like copy /exclude=* .bak [.work] [.prod] (that space after the asterisk shouldn't be there but markdown) than the equivalent command in a Unix shell, apparently:

$ shopt -s extglob # to enable extglob

$ cp work/!(*.bak) prod/

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

#215

Post by dhosek »

dhosek wrote: post #214
laksdjfkasljdf wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

never understood why so many people complain about the short commands, but nobody contributes a central list of aliases with verbose names to them. alias copy_files_from_one_place_to_another=cp this tells me short names aren't a problem to begin with. And everyone would have the same discoverability problems with longer ones.

Verbose is a relative thing. `copy` is an intuitive name, `cp` not so much. Likewise, it's a lot easier to remember how to do something like copy /exclude=* .bak [.work] [.prod] (that space after the asterisk shouldn't be there but markdown) than the equivalent command in a Unix shell, apparently: $ shopt -s extglob # to enable extglob $ cp work/!(*.bak) prod/

Which is not to say there aren't things I like about unix. The ability to chain commands through pipes is very useful (assuming that the program is pipe-friendly), and the syntax for directories in unix feels more comfortable than the same syntax in VMS and both are by far much better than the hot mess which is the DOS/Windows shell.

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

#216

Post by rbanffy »

folbec wrote: post #56
reagent_finder wrote: post #44

Pretty 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…

The 4 things I love most in Powershell, from the point of view of a maintainer of scripts, is the relative verbosity of commands (at least I don't have to go hunting for obscure acronyms, or recursive puns such as yacc, when I read code), auto-completion an auto-documentation of scripts (when I have to change something), and object pipe (as a maintainer I hate awk and regular expressions in general). Only defect is t…

> the relative verbosity of commands (at least I don't have to go hunting for obscure acronyms, or recursive puns such as yacc, when I read code)

"yacc" is not a command. It's an executable file that's read and executed. In fact, most of the things in a shell script are not commands, but files that are loaded and executed. If someone built a shell with everything built in it'd be a bloated monster full of inconsistencies and incompatibilities.

OTOH, PowerShell has "commands" or aliases named after Unix executables, such as "curl", that don't replicate the switches one would expect from the curl program.

> It's still a bit green on Linux environments, but it already beats many of the alternatives.

Maybe for Windows transplants. In general, not at all.

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

#217

Post by [deleted] »

kazinator wrote: post #182
reagent_finder wrote: post #44

Pretty 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…

grep was standardized around 1990 by POSIX.2. In the last 25 years, I haven't had any problems with the POSIX compatible flags of grep, so maybe those points are not so relevant. Using grep for '$' without being aware that grep patterns are regular expressions ((g)lobal search for (re)gexp, and (p)rint), and redirecting the output to the printer without first seeing what it might be (e.g. with .. | head -50) is prett…

[deleted]

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

#218

Post by rbanffy »

kazinator wrote: post #182
reagent_finder wrote: post #44

Pretty 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…

grep was standardized around 1990 by POSIX.2. In the last 25 years, I haven't had any problems with the POSIX compatible flags of grep, so maybe those points are not so relevant. Using grep for '$' without being aware that grep patterns are regular expressions ((g)lobal search for (re)gexp, and (p)rint), and redirecting the output to the printer without first seeing what it might be (e.g. with .. | head -50) is prett…

> Using grep for '$' without being aware that grep patterns are regular expressions

There's always `fgrep` or, IIRC, the POSIX-compliant `grep -F`.

More often than not, people don't want regular expressions.

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

#219

Post by reallydontask »

rbanffy wrote: post #216
folbec wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 4 things I love most in Powershell, from the point of view of a maintainer of scripts, is the relative verbosity of commands (at least I don't have to go hunting for obscure acronyms, or recursive puns such as yacc, when I read code), auto-completion an auto-documentation of scripts (when I have to change something), and object pipe (as a maintainer I hate awk and regular expressions in general). Only defect is t…

> the relative verbosity of commands (at least I don't have to go hunting for obscure acronyms, or recursive puns such as yacc, when I read code) "yacc" is not a command. It's an executable file that's read and executed. In fact, most of the things in a shell script are not commands, but files that are loaded and executed. If someone built a shell with everything built in it'd be a bloated monster full of inconsisten…

> Maybe for Windows transplants. In general, not at all.

care to elaborate

In my experience, Powershell is so much nicer than bash that even on my work mac I tend to use it when doing stuff for me (not going to force it on my team)

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

#220

Post by Aloha »

reagent_finder wrote: post #44

Pretty 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…

When I'm on a strange system for the first time and I need grep, the first thing I'm doing is grep --help or man grep to check to see what I'm doing with.
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