Live data from Hacker News

Marcel the Shell

marceltheshell.org

131–140 of 209 posts

Re: Marcel the Shell

#131
Marcel the author here. Didn't know I was also a shell, though I do also have one that is somewhat similar in concept.

While taking an existing programming language like Python is an obvious choice (and one that's been made a bunch of times), I think that ultimately you need a language where something like a pipe (of objects or text) is not bolted on, but a natural consequence of a more general view of programming based on architectural interconnection.

"Pipes and filters" is an architectural style. And it is itself a polymorphic style, meaning there can be substyles that pass objects and substyles that pass bytes, substyles where the filters are processes and substyles where filters are components within a process.

So: good direction, more of this!

Re: Marcel the Shell

#132
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emulating a printer connected to a typewriter is a design smell.

I agree. It maybe wasn't design smell when it was designed but 50 years later it definitely is a design/culture smell. Doesn't make "tooling" any less smelly though.

Maybe it is time to rethink what a terminal is, and get rid of the restriction to be text-only? There is really no reason for that, other than Typewriter heritage.

Re: Marcel the Shell

#133
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In defense of the Microsoft-haters, powershell is a fantastic idea with terrible ergonomics. When they first released it I was very excited but, well, it’s just awful to use. Terrible Get-Finger-Twister -Recurse -Awfully commands, quirky aliases (you can type “curl” but it takes none of curl’s parameters because it’s an alias for Get-WebRequest-Annoyingly or whatever they called it), simple scripting things such as “…

Alias, code completion and nice IDE tooling is the trick, not being stuck in UNIX like CLI mentality.

I don’t know man, when I open Microsoft PowerShell in Microsoft Terminal on my Microsoft Windows, I don’t even get autocomplete.

If Microsoft intends PowerShell to be combined with IDE-like features then they sure have a funny way of showing it.

Re: Marcel the Shell

#134
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, there's no code completion for powershell so nice, as fish provides. In this area, Powershell (plus addons, like oh-my-posh) just mimimcs existing popular bash/zsh capabalities.

Fish isn't UNIX, and stating that Powershell just mimics existing popular bash/zsh means your not aware of Powershell capabilities versus bash/zsh. Since when do bash/zsh offer a full sane programming language, not relying in external executables, a full blown language framework ecosystem, ability to load shared objects and importing public symbols as functions, and interoperate with D-BUS (as COM counterpart) as if…

> Fish isn't UNIX,

Could be, but that wasn't the argument. The argument was, that fish has nice auto-completion, and that could be done without $irrelevant_feature_list.

(Also, by the same token, Powershell isn't Windows.)

> stating that Powershell just mimics existing popular bash/zsh means your not aware of Powershell capabilities versus bash/zsh.

So what does it better than bash/zsh in the area of code completion? Simple tab completion? For history, Ctrl-R and F7? Woo-hoo.

> Since when do bash/zsh offer a full sane programming language, not relying in external executables, (...)

Which is completely irrelevant when we are discussing code completion.

Re: Marcel the Shell

#135
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. It maybe wasn't design smell when it was designed but 50 years later it definitely is a design/culture smell. Doesn't make "tooling" any less smelly though.

Maybe it is time to rethink what a terminal is, and get rid of the restriction to be text-only? There is really no reason for that, other than Typewriter heritage.

It's been that time for decades. And it has been retought many times but never seems to catch on.

I think even unices have abandoned the UNIX philosophy and turned largely into "there's an app for that", so maybe there's not much interest for a better composable UI.

Re: Marcel the Shell

#136
post #23

I’m not sure this would be the way to go, but it’d be awesome if most Unix command-line tools had a way to accept and output JSON objects.

The "tree" command will output JSON on fd3 (which it dubs 'stddata') when available.

If more programs adopt that pattern we could use stdout (fd1) only for interactive programs.

Re: Marcel the Shell

#137
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Needing an IDE for a shell!? "Tooling" is a design smell. It's building hacks on hacks to make bad design and lack of understanding somewhat manageable. For better systems all you need is a shell and a text editor. That said, we do need a better shell. But definitely one with UNIX and CLI mentality.

Welcome to the world of Lisp Machines, Xerox PARC and ETHZ. Unfortunely taken away due to UNIX's free beer offerings.

I almost daily daydream of the alternate timeline where MBAs and greed didn't destroy Lisp Machines. And lament that we ended up with this horrible pile of hacks that makes everything needlessly painful.

Re: Marcel the Shell

#138
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alias, code completion and nice IDE tooling is the trick, not being stuck in UNIX like CLI mentality.

Needing an IDE for a shell!? "Tooling" is a design smell. It's building hacks on hacks to make bad design and lack of understanding somewhat manageable. For better systems all you need is a shell and a text editor. That said, we do need a better shell. But definitely one with UNIX and CLI mentality.

And what are these "better systems"?

Re: Marcel the Shell

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Needing an IDE for a shell!? "Tooling" is a design smell. It's building hacks on hacks to make bad design and lack of understanding somewhat manageable. For better systems all you need is a shell and a text editor. That said, we do need a better shell. But definitely one with UNIX and CLI mentality.

And what are these "better systems"?

GNU for example.

Re: Marcel the Shell

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the other thing named Marcel?

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On [1], a recent Oscar-nominated film [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_the_Shell_with_Shoes_On...

That's in a completely different business. Trademarks generally do not cover all possible uses of a word, only the use of that word in the segment it was approved for.
Post reply on HN