GitHub – nushell/nushell: A new type of shell • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub – nushell/nushell: A new type of shell

#81

Post by pdpi » Wed, Jun 16, 2021, 7:51 AM UTC

chx wrote: post #65

vbsteven wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Cargo doubling as both build tool and package manager is a big factor here. The combination of Cargo + crates.io makes it very easy to write some Rust code and make it available to anyone with Cargo on their system. Either by `cargo install nu` to build it from sources on crates.io or `cargo install` inside the git repo to build my own customized version. No more waiting for distro packagers to keep up. Putti…

This is insanity and hubris. "It's so easy!" yes if you have the language and tools de jour installed and up to date. I want none of that. It was node and npm. Then go. Now Rust and cargo. Oh, I forgot ruby. And all this needs to be up to date or things break. (And if you do update them then things you are actively using will break.) I don't need more tamagochis, in fact the less I have, the better. What happened to…

Ease of use and familiarity are different things. Tooling around rust really is easy, when the alternatives (for equivalent languages) are CMake, autotools, and the like.

As it stands, I can brew install ripgrep and it just works. I don’t need to know it’s written it rust. If, for some reason, homebrew (or whatever other package manager) is lagging behind and I need a new release now, cargo install is a much easier alternative compared to, again, other tools built in equivalent languages

Re: GitHub – nushell/nushell: A new type of shell

#82

Post by kaba0 » Wed, Jun 16, 2021, 7:51 AM UTC

rjzzleep wrote: post #78

anticodon wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I haven't used PowerShell. And I agree that my comment is uninformed. It's just that I feel uncomfortable even looking at the PS syntax. Maybe it's idiosyncratic. Maybe I've spent too many years in Unix shell.

I've used it and I can relate to the comment. Maybe your assumptions are off in there, but I think the main point you were trying to make is that it's complicated. It's so complicated that you really need a repl to be able to work with it efficiently. It's a bit like how programming Java is simple if you do it in Idea or back then in eclipse, but in a pure editor it's impossible to remember all the boilerplate.

Can you write a bash one-liner that gets the free memory of your system? Is the awk blackmagic better than selecting an item of an object? Of course new things will be harder to write but it’s a people problem not something inherent with PS.

Re: GitHub – nushell/nushell: A new type of shell

#83

Post by im3w1l » Wed, Jun 16, 2021, 7:52 AM UTC

oarsinsync wrote: post #77

tgv wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A pipe only conveys stdout. You could redirect 4>&1 1>/dev/null, but you'd have to rewrite all tools to generate both stdout and stdjson anyway.

> You could redirect 4>&1 1>/dev/null For anyone confused by this, 1 is the output to stdout, and 4 is being redirected to where 1 goes, which is stdout. Unrelated to that, 1 (what’s actually being output to stout by the application) is being redirected to /dev/null. The order of operations matters. If 1 was redirected to /dev/null first, then 4 would also end up in /dev/null. As it stands now, that doesn’t happen.

So you are supposed to read it from right to left? "First take 1 and throw it away. Next put 4 in 1." Is that how it works?

Re: GitHub – nushell/nushell: A new type of shell

#84

Post by jntrnr » Wed, Jun 16, 2021, 7:57 AM UTC

the_biot wrote: post #69

Nushell missed the one feature that every Unix shell has: if it doesn't recognize the first word as a built-in command, look it up and run it as an executable. It's crucial, and nushell is missing out on an ecosystem of random shell commands to complement it as a result. This, of course, is what makes the Unix shell so great: the many little programs able to work together via pipelines. This makes nushell an interpre…

This is how Nushell works. If the command isn't an internal command, it will run it from you path.

Curious what you tried that didn't work.

Re: GitHub – nushell/nushell: A new type of shell

#85

Post by andix » Wed, Jun 16, 2021, 7:57 AM UTC

I never really got acquainted with PowerShell. It always felt very clunky to me. But it exists, it's mature, it's cross platform and widely supported.

Maybe I should give PowerShell Core a try.

Re: GitHub – nushell/nushell: A new type of shell

#86

Post by pdpi » Wed, Jun 16, 2021, 7:58 AM UTC

junon wrote: post #42

baby wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s the new C/C++ but also you can write Rust like you’re writing Golang.

None of that sounds appealing on its own. Ready for the downvote wave. :D

This is a thread about a shell. That’s very much the sort of project that is typically written in C, and also the sort of project that really benefits from being written in something safer.

It’s fine if writing systems languages doesn’t appeal to you, but they fulfil an important niche in. V8, Hotspot, Cpython all have to be written in something.

Re: GitHub – nushell/nushell: A new type of shell

#87

Post by vkoskiv » Wed, Jun 16, 2021, 7:59 AM UTC

stevenhuang wrote: post #76

chx wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is insanity and hubris. "It's so easy!" yes if you have the language and tools de jour installed and up to date. I want none of that. It was node and npm. Then go. Now Rust and cargo. Oh, I forgot ruby. And all this needs to be up to date or things break. (And if you do update them then things you are actively using will break.) I don't need more tamagochis, in fact the less I have, the better. What happened to…

Why don't you download the native binaries then? Rust isn't an interpreted language, you only need the rust toolchain if you want to build from source.

Binary releases seem uncommon from my perspective. Every time I go to install a piece of software written in Rust from homebrew, it invariably starts installing some massive Rust toolchain as a dependency, at which point I give up and move on. Maybe it's a case of the packagers taking a lazy route or something, or maybe there is a reason for depending on cargo. I have no idea.

Re: GitHub – nushell/nushell: A new type of shell

#88

Post by pdpi » Wed, Jun 16, 2021, 8:00 AM UTC

kamray23 wrote: post #36

lovelyviking wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That is like a big deal Why you think it is "a big deal"?

Why do you not? No memory leaks, no security issues stemming from such. No random crashes from memory misuse, no issues debugging the issues that exist. It's like a higher level language but lower. You get to do things your way, except when your way is fundamentally unsafe. The code is then easier to debug as it actually describes what's happening and issues are mostly algorithmic, while the application gets a massiv…

Rust is perfectly happy to leak memory. Leaks are not considered unsafe. There was actually a bit of a reckoning around the 1.0 release where people widely assumed the language wouldn’t leak, and leaks were proven to be safe behaviour.

Re: GitHub – nushell/nushell: A new type of shell

#89

Post by aldanor » Wed, Jun 16, 2021, 8:02 AM UTC

chx wrote: post #65

vbsteven wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Cargo doubling as both build tool and package manager is a big factor here. The combination of Cargo + crates.io makes it very easy to write some Rust code and make it available to anyone with Cargo on their system. Either by `cargo install nu` to build it from sources on crates.io or `cargo install` inside the git repo to build my own customized version. No more waiting for distro packagers to keep up. Putti…

This is insanity and hubris. "It's so easy!" yes if you have the language and tools de jour installed and up to date. I want none of that. It was node and npm. Then go. Now Rust and cargo. Oh, I forgot ruby. And all this needs to be up to date or things break. (And if you do update them then things you are actively using will break.) I don't need more tamagochis, in fact the less I have, the better. What happened to…

Ruby requires an interpreter at runtime. JavaScript too. Rust produces standalone binaries. So no, "things don't break" and you only compile things once.

// I can't care less about deb or rpm files so don't try to force that down my throat.

Re: GitHub – nushell/nushell: A new type of shell

#90

Post by wokwokwok » Wed, Jun 16, 2021, 8:03 AM UTC

kaba0 wrote: post #54

anticodon wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PowerShell from Microsoft is looking too alien on Unix. Just looking at the syntax I already feel uncomfortable. It's hard for me to criticize it because I haven't used it, but it looks like it was designed by a committee and overdesigned. I.e. it wasn't created from the need, like someone at Microsoft wanted to automate his work and created PS to solve his problem. It looks like some boss decided: "They have shells,…

I’m sorry to say this but this is a very uninformed comment with way too many biases without any backing. > I.e. it wasn't created from the need, like someone at Microsoft wanted to automate his work and created PS to solve his problem Interestingly enough, it is used for automating Windows configuration. Re last paragraph: UNIX commands are random letters that are like that due to historical reasons — if you don’t k…

> So while I am not particularly fond of Microsoft, powershell is better than bash (though frankly, what isn’t?) in every conceivable way.

There are fair criticisms to be made of bash...but this isn’t a fair comment either; I use power shell a lot; I’ve written hundreds or thousands of lines of powershell glue for scripts and devops pipelines and all kinds of things.

It’s not very good.

It is one of those things that seems like it’s a great idea; everything is an object, don’t serialise between jobs, tab completion on related objects, verb-noun commands... it reads like a feature matrix.

The reality is less ideal.

It’s verbose, the commands are arcane, and the verb-noun thing breaks down into meaningless pairs in many cases, particularly in the azure commands, or worse sql server commands.

Maybe, to be fair, there is a core of elegance in there, but powershell displays a fundamental failure:

When an application doesn’t have to do the hard work of making a good cli, the resulting commands in powershell are actively user hostile.

It’s a pattern I’ve seen over and over again; and things like the az-cli are a tangible acknowledgment from Microsoft itself that the results have been substandard, and rejected, overwhelming, by the broader community in favour of arguably inferior tools (eg bash).

So... you might argue “network effect”, but I don’t buy it; powershell isn’t friendly; not to new developers, not to “clicks ops” developers, not to Unix developers.

It’s firmly a middle ground “no one wants to use it if they can avoid it” product.

Bash scripts, now there is literally a hell on earth... but bash itself? Works fine.

/shrug