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GitHub – nushell/nushell: A new type of shell

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

#261

Post by steveklabnik »

pdpi wrote: post #184
pjmlp wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just hope that Rust with 40 years of backwards compatibility feels better than C++ today.

40 years is a long time, so the experience will almost certainly degrade a fair bit. The notion of editions in rust makes allowances for breaking changes while still keeping backwards compatibility, I'm very curious to see whether the problems that solves outweigh the complexity in the compiler.

The design of editions is such to specifically reduce implementation complexity in the compiler, for this reason. The majority of the compiler is edition-agnostic.

It’s not the only reason, but it’s a big one.

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

#262

Post by steveklabnik »

pjmlp wrote: post #259
pdpi wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

40 years is a long time, so the experience will almost certainly degrade a fair bit. The notion of editions in rust makes allowances for breaking changes while still keeping backwards compatibility, I'm very curious to see whether the problems that solves outweigh the complexity in the compiler.

I am not convinced that editions are much better than language version switches. They only work in the ideal case that whole dependencies are available as source code, the same compiler is used for the whole compilation process and for light syntactic changes. In fact for IntoIterator , a small fix to the editions was made, https://blog.rust-lang.org/2021/05/11/edition-2021.html With 40 years of history, several Rust…

Two out of three of those things have nothing to do with editions. The final one is basically saying “you can’t make huge changes,” and I’m not sure how that’s a criticism of the possibility of “in 40 years there will be too many changes.”

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

#263

Post by hyperpallium2 »

skissane wrote: post #70
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,…

PowerShell was started by a single person, Microsoft's Jeffrey Snover. As the project progressed other designers came on board but Snover remained (and remains) as Chief Architect. The design-by-committee allegation isn't being fair to him. Part of why PowerShell may seem not quite Unix-like, is Snover didn't just look at Unix as an influence. Snover's professional background included experience with IBM OS/400's CL…

BTW Jeffrey Snover said every PowerShell feature was supported by a business case. A principled approach, I thought, if mercenary.

But what's the "business case" for iteration, conditionals, addition - apart from "everyone needs these"? Though these probably weren't the features he was thinking of.

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

#264

Post by aru »

I use this in combination with fish shell and it's been working really well. I can just switch over to `nu` when the task merits; no need to replace my current shell. I can also just run a one-off line like this.

   nu -c "ls | where size > 10b"

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

#265

Post by [deleted] »

torginus wrote: post #218
j1elo wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I missing something cool by not looking into PowerShell for Linux? Anyone using it could chime in and share how it improves their workflow? What kind of tools does it bring to the table?

Disclaimer: I use PowerShell on Windows, I've never tried it on Linux, but I don't see why its advantages wouldn't transfer. That being said, I think it's main advantages are: - Typed object streams, which gives you stuff like autocomplete, IDE support, and generally there's no need to muck about with sed/awk/xargs - Very fast, it's absolutely fine to read a file line by line, and parse it in a script, whereas doing…

[deleted]

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

#266

Post by 411111111111111 »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #258
411111111111111 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is the writing part really what we should focus on in scripting though? i personally would've put much more weight into the ease of reading and understanding the code. personally, i think that PS just came too late, so most people (me included) are too used to the way the unix shell works/feels. It would have to be just straight up better in all regards to displace it, but its more like a different flavor entirely. I…

Wait, are you seriously trying to tell me that bash is more readable than PowerShell? Excuse me, but what alternate timeline did you accidentally stumble in from?

I did not say that, no.

I said that a lot of people (me included) are more used to Unix shell scripting. If PS had been released 30yrs ago, things wouldve probably been different. People have however already become comfortable with Unix shells, so it needs significant improvements to convince them to switch the tool of choice. While PS does have improvements, they're not significant enough to relearn everything.

To me, Unix scripts are more readable though, this is simply because Ive been writing them for so many years now, while I barely touched any PS code.

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

#267

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

j1elo wrote: post #107

Thinking this is so cool! I was wondering if seriously buying into an alternate shell like this would be worth it in the long run. Would really love to read from people who use(d) an alternative shell, both success and failure stories. I cannot shake from my head the idea that buying into a non-standard shell will only work for personal projects in one's own workstation, but it won't fly too far for company work beca…

I'm generally supportive of the effort to replace the archaic shells that dominate the unix landscape, but unfortunately none have yet met my personal desires.

It seems like a lot of the developers of these shells create them to supplement the common unix toolset, but I really want a complete replacement. Ideally, the shell itself would be a completely dependency-free static executable, with a built-in command set that includes functions to interface with all the kernel's user space accessible features, acts as a repl, with sensibly named commands, and a simple method for interfacing to and from any other program. In short, I guess I'm looking for something to act as the basis of a completely new environment on top of Linux. As it is, most of these do not even meet the first of the criteria.

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

#268

Post by aethertap »

indemnity wrote: post #177
aethertap wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my case, I use it because it is dead simple to get a standalone, lean, fast, native executable (on top of the other functional programming features). Cargo is a huge part of what I love about rust.

I have a great example. We have 100s of Markdown files. I needed a link checker with some additional validations. Existing tools took 10-20 minutes to run. I cooked up a Rust validator that uses the awesome pulldown-cmark, reqwest and rayon crates. Rayon let me do the CPU bits concurrently, and reqwest with streams made it dead simple to do the 1000s of HTTP requests with a decent level of concurrency. Indicatif gave…

Reading your comment made me realize another thing: Using rust often feels like the language is a successful attempt to take the best parts of a lot of other languages and put them together into a single, rational collection of features. Most of what's in there isn't new, but it all fits together well in one place so I don't feel like I have to make a devil's bargain for important features when I start out.

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

#269

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

411111111111111 wrote: post #266
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, are you seriously trying to tell me that bash is more readable than PowerShell? Excuse me, but what alternate timeline did you accidentally stumble in from?

I did not say that, no. I said that a lot of people (me included) are more used to Unix shell scripting. If PS had been released 30yrs ago, things wouldve probably been different. People have however already become comfortable with Unix shells, so it needs significant improvements to convince them to switch the tool of choice. While PS does have improvements, they're not significant enough to relearn everything. To m…

I very much disagree. There's a reason this is funny:

https://xkcd.com/1168/

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