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Marcel the Shell

marceltheshell.org

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Re: Marcel the Shell

#201

Post by linsomniac »

geophile wrote: post #163
linsomniac wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask what you are using for the docs?

For help documentation I wrote my own tool to format things the way I wanted for the console (e.g. colorized, adjusting to console width). For the website, I'm using wix. I'm open to suggestions for using wix better, or choosing an alternative.

Oh, interesting, Wix wasn't even on my list for consideration. I like the look of it, but I also want to pull in some of my documentation from docstrings, possibly, so I think reStructuredText is a leading contender. That's what I'm getting ready to try setting up in my github workflow to see if I can get it to automatically format and publish the documentation to a github pages site.

I'm working on a not entirely dissimilar project (mine is focused more towards: fabric/ansible/cookiecutter type workflows, leaning on a lot of shell semantics. My workflows and hopefully soon documentation may be useful to you, I'd be happy to contribute them. I auto-build and publish releases to pypi. Project is: https://github.com/linsomniac/uplaybook

Re: Marcel the Shell

#202

Post by eviks »

feldrim wrote: post #192
mgaunard wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but it is structured, you have multiple lines and each line has multiple words.

> but it is structured, you have multiple lines and each line has multiple words. This is sarcasm, right?

unfortunately, not, see the comment above

Re: Marcel the Shell

#203

Post by rbanffy »

98codes wrote: post #41
beeburrt wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the original thing? Sorry, I don't know the reference.

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=marcel%20the%20shell

If I were the author of the original, I'd be thrilled. And would offer the character as the project's mascot tied to a set of conditions based on the success of the product so that, in case it fails to gain traction, it should be renamed and allow the name to be used by another product.

It's more or less the same spirit as the Roddenberry estate allows someone to use the names - you are allowed to build a warp drive, as long as it warps spacetime and allows FTL travel.

Re: Marcel the Shell

#204

Post by mgaunard »

feldrim wrote: post #192
mgaunard wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but it is structured, you have multiple lines and each line has multiple words.

> but it is structured, you have multiple lines and each line has multiple words. This is sarcasm, right?

what more do you need? it's essentially the same as a dataframe.

Re: Marcel the Shell

#205

Post by larodi »

hug wrote: post #124
skrebbel wrote: post #94

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 “…

The verbosity is a positive, so long as you understand the constraints in which it works. Cmdlets are specifically Verb-Noun, where the list of verbs is restricted to an approved list (Get, Set, Add, Remove…) and the noun naturally follows what you might expect. Want to get an organisational unit from Active Directory? Turns out the command is Get-AdOrganizationalUnit. Discoverability is built in. All of the switches…

Verbosity, for everyone who has actually written any bash/posh, any code tbh, verbosity is something to cherish. Because, u know, someone is going to eventually read it, and at best they will not be cursing the previous author. So this verbosity in posh is very well calculated, and again - sadly misunderstood by bash/perl hackers who very often care only about themselves and not their fellows.

Re: Marcel the Shell

#206

Post by kunley »

geophile wrote: post #189
kunley wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is funny that sed and awk are often uttered together as one incantation, while in fact they are very different tools. Sed is, I dare to say, one of these quick-hack tools Unix is full of; awk in turn os a great mini-language with the defaults and builtins allowing for very concise programs. What they share in common is processing lines and using regexes, and here's where similarities end. While there is this senti…

This is a false choice. You can start with minimal structure, add it for intermediate processing and then go back to text, if you’d like. Marcel can run native commands, piping their output into other Marcel commands, as a steam of strings.

Yeah, ok that's a valid view.

I will give Marcel a try for sure, thanks.

Re: Marcel the Shell

#207

Post by geophile »

kunley wrote: post #206
geophile wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a false choice. You can start with minimal structure, add it for intermediate processing and then go back to text, if you’d like. Marcel can run native commands, piping their output into other Marcel commands, as a steam of strings.

Yeah, ok that's a valid view. I will give Marcel a try for sure, thanks.

Cool.

To address one of your other comments: "but the former retains the compatibility with all the tools that don't know the structure."

Marcel plays nicely with host executables. The strings generated by an executable can be streamed into marcel commands. Marcel structured output can be piped into executables as strings.

Example 1: Compute distribution of word lengths. This pipes cat output into marcel commands:

    cat /usr/share/dict/words | (w: (len(w), 1)) | red . + | sort
(Or you could replace cat by the marcel command "read".)

Example 2: Generate tuples of the form (i, i) and then have sed work on them.

    gen 10 | (x: (x, x)) | sed s/5/xxx/g
The (5, 5) tuple is replaced by (xxx, xxx)

Re: Marcel the Shell

#208

Post by larodi »

geophile wrote: post #147
larodi wrote: post #86

First of all - Linuxes and alike desperately need something like this shell becoming standard. And second - I always wonder how all these great minds who where throwing rubbish at Microsoft ever since... somehow forgot to mention that same company created important product called PowerShell like 20 years ago. And you know PowerShell is so good already you can easily drop it in any OS/X, Linux and it actually works. N…

I wrote Marcel, and its forerunner osh, also recently on HN. Osh actually preceded powershell, and in fact I don’t recall it receiving any acknowledgement from Microsoft . To be fair, I’m sure they never heard of it. The idea of piping objects has been rediscovered many times.

You are missing part of the picture. Object tossing is one thing, having access to the plethora of apis you get from Com+ and .net in a finger snap is another.

Of course - kudos for your efforts. Sadly went unnoticed for vry long.

Re: Marcel the Shell

#209

Post by lispm »

jampekka wrote: post #198
geophile wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that what happened? MBAs and greed destroy a lot, but I’m not sure about Lisp machines. Beautiful hardware and software, but unbelievably expensive, and custom hardware was bound to lose out on performance.

Symbolics/Noftsker is often attributed as the reason for the Lisp "split" and turning Lisp machines proprietary (and needlessly expensive). The arrival of microcomputers, and horrors like Microsoft, were of course a major reason too. https://www.gnu.org/gnu/road-to-gnu.en.html#betrayed https://www.gnu.org/gnu/road-to-gnu.en.html#betrayed

The "MIT Lisp Machine" were developed as prototypes at the MIT AI Lab, with DARPA money (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a research funding part of the US military). The machines were mostly hand-made and did cost a little under $100000 to make. Only very few (200 ?) were ever made for use at MIT.

The military wanted (!) to have better/cheaper generations of these computers for Research&Development and for deployment of applications. So it was decided to set up commercial companies: LMI and Symbolics were founded. LMI later sold a license to TI. The market for these machines was high-end: installations could cost anything from $50000 to $200000. In the first years these machines mostly went into military and government projects: military was sponsoring the deployment and first improvements (like the development of Lisp-specific CPUs).

Basically that's not unusual from many other government sponsored research, which later got marketed by a startup.

The Lisp they were using was standardized starting 81/82 (also with the help of Symbolics). This standard then was ported to PCs, Macs, Workstations and Mainframes. The Lisps were available free or commercial (a few hundred dollar to several thousand, depending on the vendor).

The Lisp machines itself remained tied to special hardware and mostly died in the late 80s and early 90s.

Various other free and commercial offerings of Lisp for PCs/Macs/UNIX systems died or survived...

The whole thing was initially financed by a large customer: the government (-> DARPA). This customer demanded commercial versions to be able to use them beyond the few prototypes. Roughly 10k machines (my estimate) were built and sold. At the same time cheaper Lisp systems were developed by universities and commercial competitors. Free / Open Source versions of Common Lisp (the Lisp dialect then also on the Lisp Machines) were developed by CMU (CMUCL), in Germany (CLISP, CLICC), in Japan (KCL), ...

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