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Four features that justify a new Unix shell

oilshell.org

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Re: Four features that justify a new Unix shell

#31

Post by com2kid »

chubot wrote: post #24
solarkraft wrote: post #16

OSH is probably a good incremental improvement over bash, but I also enjoy using the significantly more tradition-breaking Powershell with its object oriented nature. It feels a lot more like programming and actually gives you useful suggestions right inside the terminal! On Linux the auto completion behavior is luckily less obnoxious than on Windows and it doesn't have the multi second startup delay either.

I should turn this into a FAQ, but PowerShell is natural on Windows, where the OS provides objects (either via the .NET VM, or COM and .DLLs, etc.) A Unix shell like bash or Oil is natural on Unix, where the OS uses text files. And in distributed systems where data is JSON, YAML, XML, protobuf, msgpack, etc. not objects. So basically shell is a "situated" language, and the easy of accomplishing any given task depends…

> I connected to that ads database (I assure you, random engineers can no longer do this!), copied out all of the ads+keywords, and did a little bit of sorting and filtering with some UNIX SHELL COMMANDS

One of PowerShell's nifty tricks includes being able to walk a SQL DB like its a file system, see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/powershell/navigate-sql...

PowerShell is insanely flexible.

Re: Four features that justify a new Unix shell

#32

Post by RMPR »

3np wrote: post #12

Two ergonomic issues in POSIX/bash not mentioned that I’d like to see a new shell improve on: - splitting pipes to separate flows (e.g one flow for stderr, one for stdout). Think of it as a graph. - native parallelization; I have to look in man every other time I use parallel.

> native parallelization; I have to look in man every other time I use parallel.

Can relate, the syntax is very strange, at least to me. And I wonder where it came from.

Re: Four features that justify a new Unix shell

#34

Post by 7thaccount »

strbean wrote: post #27
chubot wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you can run your bash scripts with Oil. The tagline is: It's our upgrade path from bash to a better language and runtime. [1] It's basically the same as JS -> TypeScript, or PHP -> Hack. It's a saner language (and runtime) that runs existing code. ----- Shell is good for creating Unix systems because of the tools it provides. Ones that deal with the file system and heterogeneous processes (i.e. stuff you didn…

Seems like a big part of why shells are so much better for certain tasks is because of a failing of more general purpose languages. Working with the filesystem, spawning processes, and orchestrating io streams. Shells could almost be considered DSLs for these things, plus some session / state management. So I think a good question is this: why can't we make these things equally easy to do in a more general purpose la…

TCL, Powershell, and Rebol are probably the closest I've seen in this area.

Re: Four features that justify a new Unix shell

#35

Post by titanomachy »

3np wrote: post #12

Two ergonomic issues in POSIX/bash not mentioned that I’d like to see a new shell improve on: - splitting pipes to separate flows (e.g one flow for stderr, one for stdout). Think of it as a graph. - native parallelization; I have to look in man every other time I use parallel.

The first is interesting. I have a hard time imagining what that syntax would look like. You'd need a way to refer to your graph nodes, so I don't think you would get much better than what named pipes (aka FIFOs) already provide.

Totally agree about GNU parallel. The syntax is not badly-designed IMO, but I don't use it very frequently and it's different from everything else so I often get it wrong. Using it as a drop-in replacement for xargs is easy enough though.

Re: Four features that justify a new Unix shell

#36

Post by quotemstr »

These things might justify making a non-Bourne shell, but they don't justify making a greenfield shell: the fish shell already has all these features, and since we all benefit by reducing shell fragmentation, I think the author ought to work on hacking on fish more before making yet another shell.

Re: Four features that justify a new Unix shell

#37

Post by wvenable »

solarkraft wrote: post #16

OSH is probably a good incremental improvement over bash, but I also enjoy using the significantly more tradition-breaking Powershell with its object oriented nature. It feels a lot more like programming and actually gives you useful suggestions right inside the terminal! On Linux the auto completion behavior is luckily less obnoxious than on Windows and it doesn't have the multi second startup delay either.

As a software developer, not a sysadmin, I have real trouble with Powershell. They didn't tradition-break enough and it's like some bastard child of .NET and Bash. I think most people have an easier time understanding https://www.cs-script.net.

It's powerful but the syntax and semantics are maddening.

It's going to be entrenched in the Windows world for the next 20 years and prevent anything better from coming along.

Re: Four features that justify a new Unix shell

#38

Post by clashmeifyoucan »

ilaksh wrote: post #33

Just in case people are looking for something really new in a shell: besides Oil, check out fish shell. The killer feature for me is its autocompletion -- its basically psychic.

can't recommend fish enough, the autocompletions and the intelligent history scrolling absolutely made the difference to me.

probably an unpopular opinion but I really like fish scripting more than bash, the syntax is way more intuitive and I don't find myself missing bash at all.

Re: Four features that justify a new Unix shell

#39

Post by viraptor »

kccqzy wrote: post #6
breatheoften wrote: post #3

Are there any transpile to bash languages? I like the idea of a language that allows for a better experience in writing shell scripts -- and produces shell scripts with fewer bugs on the output side. But i wonder if a transpile approach wouldn't be better in the long run

What do you think produces the traditional ./configure scripts that you run to configure an open source project prior to building it? Did some human write these ./configure scripts manually?

M4 doesn't really satisfy:

> better experience in writing

It will happily transform a small mistake into garbage. Then you have to debug both the transformed result and the original script to match up what you intended.

Re: Four features that justify a new Unix shell

#40

Post by boogies »

solarkraft wrote: post #16

OSH is probably a good incremental improvement over bash, but I also enjoy using the significantly more tradition-breaking Powershell with its object oriented nature. It feels a lot more like programming and actually gives you useful suggestions right inside the terminal! On Linux the auto completion behavior is luckily less obnoxious than on Windows and it doesn't have the multi second startup delay either.

> feels a lot more like programming

When I want to program a script, I can use a scripting programming language like Python with its object oriented nature.

When I want to interactively command my computer I can use a shell like bash or zsh.

Do one thing and do it well.

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