Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fish is similar in this way, if you're not on Windows and thus don't have access to PowerShell.
PowerShell is besides Linux also available on Unix.
Unix is a family of OSes that includes Linux in particular.
A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
181–190 of 286 posts
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#182Pretty much each point raised in this post(?) are correct, current and relevant even 26 years later. POSIX is a monolith and really deserves to be improved. It's been around forever, yes. It will probably keep on being around forever, yes. Take the tar command (please!), which is already a nightmare where lower-case `a' means "check first" and upper-case `A' means "delete all my disk files without asking" (or somethi…
grep was standardized around 1990 by POSIX.2. In the last 25 years, I haven't had any problems with the POSIX compatible flags of grep, so maybe those points are not so relevant.
Using grep for '$' without being aware that grep patterns are regular expressions ((g)lobal search for (re)gexp, and (p)rint), and redirecting the output to the printer without first seeing what it might be (e.g. with .. | head -50) is pretty stupid.
Consider that this person's idea of solving the problem of "move occurrences of $ character to a different location within the line" in a bunch of files was to begin by searching for lines containing those $ characters and sending that to a printer. What? How is the hard copy going to help? Are you going to sit there manually typing in those paths and looking for those line numbers, to do the edit? If that is really the VMS way, who wants anything to do with it?
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#183Pretty much each point raised in this post(?) are correct, current and relevant even 26 years later. POSIX is a monolith and really deserves to be improved. It's been around forever, yes. It will probably keep on being around forever, yes. Take the tar command (please!), which is already a nightmare where lower-case `a' means "check first" and upper-case `A' means "delete all my disk files without asking" (or somethi…
The 4 things I love most in Powershell, from the point of view of a maintainer of scripts, is the relative verbosity of commands (at least I don't have to go hunting for obscure acronyms, or recursive puns such as yacc, when I read code), auto-completion an auto-documentation of scripts (when I have to change something), and object pipe (as a maintainer I hate awk and regular expressions in general). Only defect is t…
I agree completely. Powershell is a pleasure to write in and read and the various modules for managing different services makes my life way easier.
For anyone who's been put in charge of managing Zoom for their organization, may I recommend: https://github.com/JosephMcEvoy/PSZoom
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue with git is that no matter how well documented, the user interface is horribly designed. For starters, how many different things does "git checkout" do, and how many of them actually reflect an intuitive meaning of "checking out" ?
> the user interface is horribly designed I see this type of remark against git quite often on HN and I think it's exaggerated. I agree some of the porcelain are misleading and overloaded as convenience functions such as checkout, however a decent chunk of it is inline with the underlying data structure. Nothing is perfect, and git is pretty damn good - horribly designed? no, could do with some breaking porcelain re-…
> I see this type of remark against git quite often on HN and I think it's exaggerated.
Indeed, in more erudite forums with smarter users, more level-headed, less biased opinions of git circulate.
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#185Unix is the ultimate example of "worse is better." VMS, which is what the article is about, was definitely more elegant, easier to grok, and far better documented. So was IBM's VM which had what we now call "containers" working simply and reliably 30 years ago.
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#186>is "rm" (pronounced "remove") really synonymous with "delete". Do I call the deleters when I want to move house. How would my first cousins once-deleted feel? I don't think it's good to make the command name an English word. Perhaps it would make the command easier to discover, but it would also introduce certain unpredictable connotations. For instance, if the command was called 'remove', then someone might presume…
But that's really nonsense, right? It's clearly intended to be a shorthand for "remove" that saves a few keystrokes, just as "cp" is a shorthand for copy. And remove is ambiguous compared to delete. These are petty complaints, but Rob Pike's attempt to dodge them seems a big disingenuous.
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#187Unix was at first a quite different experience, I think. The Bell Labs Unix had only a few utilities, each one was simple, and the documentation was good. There's a nice relevant quote: "Cat went to Berkeley, came back waving flags." It's about how the commands (even cat) got many additional options after third parties got their hands on them (or reimplemented them).
There are manuals for old Unix versions here, maybe start with V7 if interested: http://man.cat-v.org
The paper "Program design in the UNIX environment" or the book "The UNIX Programming Environment", both by Rob Pike and Brian Kernighan, might be of interest.
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the user interface is horribly designed I see this type of remark against git quite often on HN and I think it's exaggerated. I agree some of the porcelain are misleading and overloaded as convenience functions such as checkout, however a decent chunk of it is inline with the underlying data structure. Nothing is perfect, and git is pretty damn good - horribly designed? no, could do with some breaking porcelain re-…
The git UI is absolutely horribly designed, as demonstrated by the mercurial or darcs UIs which, while completely different, were significantly easier to discover, intuit and remember. > git is pretty damn good UI-wise, it really is not.
The concept of the git staging area is utterly superfluous. All local changes that are propagated to the version control system should go directly into a durable commit object, and not to a pseudo-commit object that isn't a commit, and that can be casually trashed.
That commit object could be pointed at by a separate COMMIT_HEAD pointer. If you have a COMMIT_HEAD different from HEAD, then you have a commit brewing. Finalizing the commit means moving HEAD to be the same as COMMIT_HEAD. (At that time, there is a prompt for the log message, if one hasn't been already prepared.)
Your "staged" changes are then "git diff HEAD..COMMIT_HEAD", and not "git diff --cached".
Speaking of which, why the hell is "cached" a synonym for "in the index"? Oh, because the index holds a full snapshot of everything. But that proliferation of terminology just adds to the confusion.
I can't think of any other area of computing in which "cache" and "index" are mixed up.
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#189Are we going to completely ignore the fact that this purported Requiem for VMS tells us in great detail why Unix suxx - but literally (and I do mean literally) not a single thing about why VMS should be mourned. If this is how VMS advocacy looks like, I'm not surprised it disappeared.
Isn't it?
What's more, and this keeps behind repeated and emulated, I do not understand how being arrogant, condescending, insulting, full of bad faith scorn and hatred is supposed to make me be part of a group or use a tech, API, stack, framework or what not.
"I'm a VMS user", they seem to say, "watch me be a nasty person."
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#190Pretty much each point raised in this post(?) are correct, current and relevant even 26 years later. POSIX is a monolith and really deserves to be improved. It's been around forever, yes. It will probably keep on being around forever, yes. Take the tar command (please!), which is already a nightmare where lower-case `a' means "check first" and upper-case `A' means "delete all my disk files without asking" (or somethi…
The 4 things I love most in Powershell, from the point of view of a maintainer of scripts, is the relative verbosity of commands (at least I don't have to go hunting for obscure acronyms, or recursive puns such as yacc, when I read code), auto-completion an auto-documentation of scripts (when I have to change something), and object pipe (as a maintainer I hate awk and regular expressions in general). Only defect is t…
yacc is not a recursive abbr, it stands for Yet Another Compiler Compiler.