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Become Shell Literate

drewdevault.com

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Re: Become Shell Literate

#151

Post by BlueDingo »

tracyhenry wrote: post #135
morelisp wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A better example might be perpetuating typos (and other less obviously wrong bad names), the number of times I've seen some variant of "setIntercetpor" or "closeDataSteam" or... anything that gets actually typed as "most of the first word plus completion."

Your example sounded like results produced with editors that do not understand the underlying language. A proper IDE would not prompt you with closeDataSteam if it's not a member function of the object to which you want to close the data stream.

Right, the typo was done once and from then on the IDE offered it up for auto completion.

Re: Become Shell Literate

#152

Post by enriquto »

geophile wrote: post #146
enriquto wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, this is doable with find and awk You don't even need awk for that one: grep ^class `find . -mtime -1 | grep py$` Maybe you could try to use an example where it really makes a difference? Some natural operation that would be very cumbersome with plain shell but is easy and direct with marcel. Otherwise many people may fail to see the point.

Read a CSV file, foo.csv, and sort by the sum of the 4th and 7th columns (which are integers): read -c foo.csv | sort (*x: int(x[3]) + int(x[6])) I suppose we could argue about what is a "natural" operation. Marcel grew out of a set of tasks that were "natural" in the domain I was working in. An important part of that domain was operating on databases, and clusters of nodes, and databases on those nodes. So marcel ha…

> Read a CSV file, foo.csv, and sort by the sum of the 4th and 7th columns (which are integers):

Yes, that's a much better example. Here the "obvious" shell solution involves using awk to compute the sum of the two columns and putting it as the first field, sorting by the first field, and then removing that field. I guess a "rosetta stone" of such examples (e.g. on the frontpage of the site) would make a strong case for the interest of marcel.

Re: Become Shell Literate

#153

Post by natrys »

mattmanser wrote: post #62
gfxgirl wrote: post #29

Someone should write "become IDE literate" as a response to opening of using vim with no extensions and using grep a lot. I've been using editors that are language aware since at least the late 90s. Depending on the language they'll show me all references, take me to the definition or declaration, stack those jumps so as I follow the links I can pop back a level to where I was. All of this is instant. 1000x faster th…

On top of that, his opening example is so easy if you use a GUI for Git it's mind-boggling. It'd literally be click status column to sort, click top entry, shift-click bottom deleted file, right-click, restore. Done, a couple of seconds without even thinking about it. And somehow this simple task in a GUI inspired a blog post about how useful the shell is. I'm not going to deny a shell is extremely useful, and knowin…

The point of the article clearly is about how a few general purpose shell tools can combine together to be the "right" tool in so many different usecases for which they weren't specifically designed for. You can argue for more specialized tool, and that's okay. But saying just "this" task inspired this blog post clearly misses the point of the article, which is generality.

In any case there are like a bazillion of GUI git tools. Are you certain each and all of them support this feature? If someone doesn't know any of them, what are the odds the first GUI tool they install has this feature? The hidden cost of finding the "right" tool is overlooked in its advocacy.

Re: Become Shell Literate

#154

Post by scns »

morelisp wrote: post #99
bentcorner wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do like my IDE but my one complaint with leaning on it a lot is that it lets you write code that is harder to understand if you don't have that IDE readily available. For example, if you name a member "flag" and you have several types with the same member, your IDE can tell you where this flag is used, so it's not a big deal if you wanted to refactor or are trying to track down a bug. But god help you if you're loo…

A better example might be perpetuating typos (and other less obviously wrong bad names), the number of times I've seen some variant of "setIntercetpor" or "closeDataSteam" or... anything that gets actually typed as "most of the first word plus completion."

Intellij would mark those with squiggly underlines and even jump there in an otherwise error free file when you press f2.

Re: Become Shell Literate

#155

Post by intrepidhero »

This week I got my drill bit bound up in a double stud I wanted to run some wire through. The drill went into thermal cut out and wouldn't budge. I was at a loss of how to get the bit out without destroying the stud until I remembered I had a hand drill in the shop. It came from my great-grandfather. It's solid and well maintained and I was able to hand crank that drill bit through the rest of the wood. That's not the first time a simple hand tool has saved the day when a power tool let me down.

I agree that IDEs and the tools that accompany them are powerful and can make you more productive. Learning them is an investment that can pay dividends. On the other hand, most of the IDEs I took the time to learn in school are now obsolete. I still use the shell today because those skills are still relevant and have gotten me out of a jam plenty of times. I've chosen to prioritize learning tools that are reliable and lasting even if it costs me some productivity.

Re: Become Shell Literate

#156

Post by nobody9999 »

spijdar wrote: post #88
CodeAndCuffs wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cant we make this argument for any level of abstraction? A lot of people start out with shells and end up being unable to understand how to construct a switch or adder in logic gates. A shell is a great tool but shouldn't be a crutch.

Emotionally, I actually agree with this. I'd love for at least a basic understanding of computers down to boolean logic and the very basics of semiconductors up to the OS level and beyond to be "widely known" by programmers and "computer literate". At the same time, I know that's extremely unreasonable to expect. I guess for the shell and editor, you can argue you ought to understand it stripped of abstractions, sinc…

>Emotionally, I actually agree with this. I'd love for at least a basic understanding of computers down to boolean logic and the very basics of semiconductors up to the OS level and beyond to be "widely known" by programmers and "computer literate".

cf. https://www.pbs.org/show/crash-course-computer-science/

No, it won't give you the level of understanding that an actual comp sci/engineering degree will (after all, it's just a couple dozen ~10 minute videos), but it does touch on all the major concepts and through the series builds on concepts presented earlier.

Re: Become Shell Literate

#157

Post by addicted »

tracyhenry wrote: post #140
teeray wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they'll show me all references, take me to the definition or declaration, stack those jumps so as I follow the links I can pop back a level to where I was. All of this is instant. I do this in stock vim using ctags files. You can generate them with anything, though “exuberant ctags” is very popular. Ctrl+] when over an identifier jumps to its definition, and there’s a tag stack to jump backwards similarly (you can…

The point of IDE is that there is almost 0 configuration. You get everything by just clicking "install". Y you can configure vim or emacs to be as expressive as IntelliJ. But the time it takes is much larger than 0. And when you switch to another language you'll probably need to repeat many steps.

The point of the OP is to not configure vim or emacs to do all that but to simply use the UNIX (or platform equivalent) shell.

Re: Become Shell Literate

#158

Post by saurik »

rollcat wrote: post #148
shriek wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some people are happy in their IDEs and see no reason to move to the lower-level of abstraction in their tooling. True but you're also at the mercy of whatever company is responsible for developing those IDEs. I'm not advocating everyone do development in shell but I feel like you should know what's going under the hood when things go wrong.

> True but you're also at the mercy of whatever company is responsible for developing those IDEs. With all the IDE companies being so ruthless, I wonder where are all those screwed-over IDE users running to.

I mean, we know the answer to this as it started the argument, right?... vim, emacs, and a handful of programmer-oriented GUI text editors such as Sublime Text (or whatever; I don't use them so I might be mixing up "what's cool" or be so out of date as to be laughable).

Re: Become Shell Literate

#159

Post by addicted »

mattmanser wrote: post #62
gfxgirl wrote: post #29

Someone should write "become IDE literate" as a response to opening of using vim with no extensions and using grep a lot. I've been using editors that are language aware since at least the late 90s. Depending on the language they'll show me all references, take me to the definition or declaration, stack those jumps so as I follow the links I can pop back a level to where I was. All of this is instant. 1000x faster th…

On top of that, his opening example is so easy if you use a GUI for Git it's mind-boggling. It'd literally be click status column to sort, click top entry, shift-click bottom deleted file, right-click, restore. Done, a couple of seconds without even thinking about it. And somehow this simple task in a GUI inspired a blog post about how useful the shell is. I'm not going to deny a shell is extremely useful, and knowin…

Now do it across 5 projects. Or help explain to all your teammates how to do it.

With the shell, the second time you do it is a few keystrokes, if even. Wanna do it across multiple projects, it’s super easy without ever loading any of them in your IDE.

Wanna share it with teammates, you simply need to pass a script file to them, and they can do it without having to do anything.

And now finally if you need to incorporate this behavior in your headless CI? It’s the same script, instead of having to putz about with the CI configurations or whatever.

Re: Become Shell Literate

#160

Post by saurik »

hagy wrote: post #124
gfxgirl wrote: post #29

Someone should write "become IDE literate" as a response to opening of using vim with no extensions and using grep a lot. I've been using editors that are language aware since at least the late 90s. Depending on the language they'll show me all references, take me to the definition or declaration, stack those jumps so as I follow the links I can pop back a level to where I was. All of this is instant. 1000x faster th…

I strongly agree with this narrative and it matches my own experience. I spent 9 years of college and then grad school using exclusively either vi or emacs because I believed IDEs were a crutch that weak engineers relied upon. It wasn't until I got a real job that I found myself forced to learn a proper IDE (IntelliJ). It blew my mind just how powerful the IDE was and how it massively increased my productivity. Putti…

I think part of this is that the people who use IDEs then prefer the actual code to be dumbed down to the point where the IDE can both understand it and then is required to manipulate it; I hate programming in Java because it is a language kind of designed to make it hard for me to build my own rapid abstractions... which of course would break the ability of the IDE to parse it at all much less refactor it; but, I then argue that the more powerful code abstractions obviate the language flaws that required "refactoring" in the first place. And to me, that is a way in which I feel like IDEs are awkward and harmful, but it is almost more at an ecosystem level than at the scale of a single person.
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