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Recently I had a local Gulp expert who had written a plugin try and help me with a simple problem: I produce a .json of load balancers from a CF stack. We need

Recently I had a local Gulp expert who had written a plugin try and help me with a simple problem: I produce a .json of load balancers from a CF stack. We need to run a command on every entry in the map to annotate it with extra information from another AWS call. It's a tricky problem not amenable to usual shell scripting (unless you use a shell with a native notion of maps and json). For the life of us, we could not find a way to make Gulp do this without essentially writing a solid block of Javascript that just does exactly what we wanted (in which case, why use anything but the shell script approach?). I understand that stream rejoining is a complex problem, but Gulp seems ideologically opposed to a more generic approach here. They get mad when people try to inject non-file based values into the system, and actively close off alternatives and shame them on their github issues. Gulp is a complete mess, in my opinion.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago
Totally. Brocoli and Brunch are a bit better, but they all have the same fundamental problem: they require you to write plugins for things. The plugin model doesn't work here because writing plugins is so difficult, and you don't want to write this crap: you just want your project to build. In addition, all of the things you want to use in a build process expose a perfectly good shell interface, which probably streams, and doesn't require anybody to write hundred-line projects to integrate into the build system. Which just begs the question: Why aren't we using shell, and make, or npm run?
- KirinDave 10y ago
  Aside, I had a similar question when I learned PowerShell. It made me question even why I was writing so many script executables. If we rely are devoted to using reusable and small components then a shell that can directly wrap our standard libraries (and has a type system rich enough to express maps and tree types) is indispensable to truly reusable software. Then what a make system should be is a clear and smart way to express dependencies and workloads.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    I disagree, for so many reasons. PS is clunky and verbose, and textual data is actually so common that the unix toolkit is incredibly useful. Ad-hoc parsing comes up a lot, and if I have to parse a format, I'd rather it be text. Maps and trees aren't as important as you make them out to be. You can do key:value stores in text at O(n) cost, which is often G ood Enough, and rarely needed. And when you really need the extra power, take your pick: Python, Perl, Ruby, SCSH, and countless others. A shell's primary job should be to support interactive use, and fast development of one-time-use scripts off the cuff, because those are what most of us do most commonly. PS doesn't support either all that well.
    - KirinDave 10y ago
      > Ad-hoc parsing comes up a lot, and if I have to parse a format, I'd rather it be text. People often offer that "plain text is superior..." but neglect to recognize that PowerShell's model actually offers as superset of the current functionality of Bash, and that when object streams are required they are utterly indispensable. It's also a uniquely eurocentric conceit that text is a simple stream of bytes. At the very least, it is a stream of bytes with an encoding label. Unicode is everywhere, and for some people is required to express their language. You can no more safely assume ISO-Latin-1 as you can UTF-8 or UTF-16. Text isn't as simple as it used to be when we didn't give a damn about half the world's population. > Maps and trees aren't as important as you make them out to be. You can do key:value stores in text at O(n) cost, which is often G ood Enough, and rarely needed. We live in a world where Curling JSON objects or (even more problematically) protobuffs objects is the de-facto way we interact with the vast majority of remote services. Feel free to try and fit every workflow you have into jq. Feel free to keep working in an environment where even functional return values are not allowed and you keep repeating the same commands over and over. > And when you really need the extra power, take your pick: Python, Perl, Ruby, SCSH, and countless others. Quick question though: how is it this any different from the plugin approach from gulp? :) > A shell's primary job should be to support interactive use, and fast development of one-time-use scripts off the cuff, because those are what most of us do most commonly. PS doesn't support either all that well. Besides the awkward subquotation escapes for passing to commands, what exactly are you saying it can't do? Verbosity isn't exactly its problem, its editors are competent, its commandlets are quite capable, it's trivial to author more (and in many ways faster, e.g., adding a cmdlet with arguments is MUCH easier than the handrolled way in bash), you can directly call into a massive stdlib and any code you've written in .NET in any language that is supported by that target (including C#, F#, Nemerle, VB, Clojure and more) with native transitioning for all object types, and a bunch of other good features. In essence that approach gives the shell a lot more room to do its work without calling out to black-box out-of-conceptual-model plugins, without sacrificing the power of being able to appeal to them when required.
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qwertyuiop924 10y ago

Totally. Brocoli and Brunch are a bit better, but they all have the same fundamental problem: they require you to write plugins for things. The plugin model doesn't work here because writing plugins is so difficult, and you don't want to write this crap: you just want your project to build. In addition, all of the things you want to use in a build process expose a perfectly good shell interface, which probably streams, and doesn't require anybody to write hundred-line projects to integrate into the build system. Which just begs the question: Why aren't we using shell, and make, or npm run?

KirinDave 10y ago
Aside, I had a similar question when I learned PowerShell. It made me question even why I was writing so many script executables. If we rely are devoted to using reusable and small components then a shell that can directly wrap our standard libraries (and has a type system rich enough to express maps and tree types) is indispensable to truly reusable software. Then what a make system should be is a clear and smart way to express dependencies and workloads.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  I disagree, for so many reasons. PS is clunky and verbose, and textual data is actually so common that the unix toolkit is incredibly useful. Ad-hoc parsing comes up a lot, and if I have to parse a format, I'd rather it be text. Maps and trees aren't as important as you make them out to be. You can do key:value stores in text at O(n) cost, which is often G ood Enough, and rarely needed. And when you really need the extra power, take your pick: Python, Perl, Ruby, SCSH, and countless others. A shell's primary job should be to support interactive use, and fast development of one-time-use scripts off the cuff, because those are what most of us do most commonly. PS doesn't support either all that well.
  - KirinDave 10y ago
    > Ad-hoc parsing comes up a lot, and if I have to parse a format, I'd rather it be text. People often offer that "plain text is superior..." but neglect to recognize that PowerShell's model actually offers as superset of the current functionality of Bash, and that when object streams are required they are utterly indispensable. It's also a uniquely eurocentric conceit that text is a simple stream of bytes. At the very least, it is a stream of bytes with an encoding label. Unicode is everywhere, and for some people is required to express their language. You can no more safely assume ISO-Latin-1 as you can UTF-8 or UTF-16. Text isn't as simple as it used to be when we didn't give a damn about half the world's population. > Maps and trees aren't as important as you make them out to be. You can do key:value stores in text at O(n) cost, which is often G ood Enough, and rarely needed. We live in a world where Curling JSON objects or (even more problematically) protobuffs objects is the de-facto way we interact with the vast majority of remote services. Feel free to try and fit every workflow you have into jq. Feel free to keep working in an environment where even functional return values are not allowed and you keep repeating the same commands over and over. > And when you really need the extra power, take your pick: Python, Perl, Ruby, SCSH, and countless others. Quick question though: how is it this any different from the plugin approach from gulp? :) > A shell's primary job should be to support interactive use, and fast development of one-time-use scripts off the cuff, because those are what most of us do most commonly. PS doesn't support either all that well. Besides the awkward subquotation escapes for passing to commands, what exactly are you saying it can't do? Verbosity isn't exactly its problem, its editors are competent, its commandlets are quite capable, it's trivial to author more (and in many ways faster, e.g., adding a cmdlet with arguments is MUCH easier than the handrolled way in bash), you can directly call into a massive stdlib and any code you've written in .NET in any language that is supported by that target (including C#, F#, Nemerle, VB, Clojure and more) with native transitioning for all object types, and a bunch of other good features. In essence that approach gives the shell a lot more room to do its work without calling out to black-box out-of-conceptual-model plugins, without sacrificing the power of being able to appeal to them when required.
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