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You Are in a Box

jyn.dev

131–138 of 138 posts

Re: You Are in a Box

#131
post #31

> there is no interop between powershell and nushell FWIW I wrote a post about this design issue: Oils Is Exterior-First (Code, Text, and Structured Data) - https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2023/06/ysh-design.html#survey... That is - Powershell and nushell have an "interior" design (within a process/VM) - while POSIX shell, bash, OSH, and YSH have an "exterior" design (between processes) And I'll claim that the exterior…

> And I'll claim that the exterior design is the glue you need in large, heterogeneous systems. Yes, but the specific format (and the way that the data transmission between processes and other pieces of the system is working) for the "exterior" design is an effect of the operating system. A different operating system might have a different way. Whether it is interior or exterior, there is going to be different data t…

the specific format ... for the "exterior" design is an effect of the operating system. A different operating system might have a different way.

I'd say it's both the operating system and the hardware. The OS tends to follow the hardware (network, disk), and there's only one kind of hardware that I know of: that which traffics in bytes, or blocks of bytes.

You can (and should) build formats on top of that, like UTF-8 and JSON, but at bottom it's bytes. Which is of course not true of the "interior" designs -- those are more like in-memory data structures created by the .NET VM, and invisible to the outside world, without serialization.

It might depend on the specific use.

I'll have to write this out fully later, but the argument is that using 2 types of glue is strictly worse than using 1, because you create a combinatorial explosions of code. You also create more software interfaces, and interfaces are where bugs tend to happen.

More code and more interfaces leads to more bugs. One type of glue is better!

Also, the glue should be dynamically typed. Because shell is for gluing together say Rust and Go, which have wildly different type systems. It's better to have 2 type systems than 3. If you have 3, then you need more glue.

"I don't glue on top of my glue" - https://oils.pub/ysh.html

Re: You Are in a Box

#132
The solution is so simple as to be boring: keep your stuff in files on the filesystem.

Your data is in a box. SaaS put your data in other people’s servers. Phones put your data in a hidden store because app APIs only let developers do it that way - and Apple decided people don’t want filesystems.

But this is all reverting back: you can download your data thanks to GDPR, and phones have file browsers now.

Every computer has a filesystem. Even ones that pretend not to. It’s the common-denominator of computing.

Re: You Are in a Box

#133

Zawinski's Law, when taken literally, argues that programs all eventually need to be communicated with by people and other programs using a generic protocol and without using program-specific or domain-specific libraries to do so. Unix shells (local), I'll add in HTTP (remote), and Email (remote and asynchronous) are the only forms that are ubiquitous, precisely because they enforce no structure for the payload. The…

every object should have its own url

Re: You Are in a Box

#134
post #53
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd closed the tab by the end of the first sentence. If the author can't be bothered, then neither can I. I tend to find people who do this have a superiority complex, they think they're so much better than everyone else that they're justified in offloading their own tiny cognitive load on to everybody else.

The author put a lot of effort into actually writing the thing, and correctly capitalized quotes, which clearly indicates a stylistic choice. You aren't willing to read text that isn't written in your preferred style, but you believe it's the author who has a superiority complex?

They didn't put enough effort in. It's not a preferred style, it's correct written English.

Re: You Are in a Box

#135
post #69
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd closed the tab by the end of the first sentence. If the author can't be bothered, then neither can I. I tend to find people who do this have a superiority complex, they think they're so much better than everyone else that they're justified in offloading their own tiny cognitive load on to everybody else.

So, you barely read one sentence, then went to the comments, read an entire thread, and took the time to post about how the author probably thinks they are superior to you? I strongly recommend rethinking that approach. You ascribed intentions to the author and then spent more time getting upset about them than you did interacting with the content. There are actually interesting points in that text, yet here we are g…

Funnily enough, I didn't read an entire thread, I read that one comment and posted an agreement to it. I'm not overly fussed if you are disappointed in me.

Re: You Are in a Box

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having used SOAP and GraphQL, I really disagree with this characterization. The problem I have seen at most organizations is they simply want their APIs to reflect their database schema, even if its not a good or useful idea. They throw junk over the wall. They carry this practice over from REST to GraphQL and of course its horrible, its not a good way to use the technology. Now organizations that understand GraphQL…

Why wouldn't you want your database schema to match how you use it?

Versioning is big one. Initially you can have them same/similar, but it is important to have that capability over time.

Re: You Are in a Box

#137
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

plan9 sucks and people who think it's cool just admit their own bad taste. Unix haters handbook made the case against Plan9 even before anyone thought of the stupid idea.

Nice take. You sound like the kind of person who only ever reads other peoples opinions and then parrots them creating the illusion that you have knowledge. Meanwhile you never bothered to boot the OS or see why people like it. It's actually pretty fucking amazing but that's okay, you are obviously too smart to use it since you read Unix Haters. Have fun with creaky old Unix.

It's definitely unpleasant when opinions you hear seem like they might be parroted, but at least it's in good faith. I find it frustrating to hear argumentation that shames, rather than attempt to correct or add anything.

Re: You Are in a Box

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is called GraphQL

Having used SOAP and GraphQL, I really disagree with this characterization. The problem I have seen at most organizations is they simply want their APIs to reflect their database schema, even if its not a good or useful idea. They throw junk over the wall. They carry this practice over from REST to GraphQL and of course its horrible, its not a good way to use the technology. Now organizations that understand GraphQL…

There is nothing you can do with GraphQL you couldn't do with soap or vice versa. They're equivalent protocols. Maybe people got better at API design in the middle but that's not related to the protocol
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