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I love it, especially using structured data instead of text for the CLI and pipes, and replacing the file system with a database. Just to rant on file systems

I love it, especially using structured data instead of text for the CLI and pipes, and replacing the file system with a database. Just to rant on file systems for a sec, I learned from working on the Meteor build tool that they are slow, flaky things. For example, there's no way on any desktop operating system to read the file tree rooted at a directory and then subscribe to changes to that tree, such that the snapshot combined with the changes gives you an accurate updated snapshot. At best, an API like FSEvents on OS X will reliably (or 99% reliably) tell you when it's time to go and re-read the tree or part of the tree, subject to inefficiency and race conditions. "Statting" 10,000 files that you just read a second ago should be fast, right? It'll just hit disk cache in RAM. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn't. You might end up waiting a second or two. And don't get me started on Windows, where simply deleting or renaming a file, synchronously and atomically, are complex topics you could spend a couple hours reading up on so that you can avoid the common pitfalls. Current file systems will make even less sense in the future, when non-volatile RAM is cheap enough to use in consumer devices, meaning that "disk" or flash has the same performance characteristics and addressability as RAM. Then we won't be able to say that persisting data to a disk is hard, so of course we need these hairy file system things. Putting aside how my data is physically persisted inside my computer, it's easy to think of better base layers for applications to store, share, and sync data. A service like Dropbox or BackBlaze would be trivial to implement if not for the legacy cruft of file systems. There's no reason my spreadsheets can't be stored in something like a git repo, with real-time sync, provided by the OS, designed to store structured data.

rdiddly 9y ago
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.io.filesystemwatcher.changed(v=vs.110).aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.io.filesyste...
- dgreensp 9y ago
  It's not that file-watching APIs (and libraries that abstract over them and try to clean them up) don't exist, it's that they are complex and unreliable, with weak semantics. Typically an "event" is basically a notification that something happened to a file in the recent past. As noted in the remarks on that page, moving a file triggers a cascade of events, which differs depending on interactions with the computer's antivirus software. You aren't making any claims about this API, though, so there is not really anything for me to refute. If the file system operated in an event-sourcing model, you'd be able to listen to a stream of events from the OS and reconstruct the state of the file system from them. If it acted like a database, you'd be able to do consistent reads, or consistent writes (transactions! holy cow).
  - zvrba 9y ago
    > If it acted like a database, you'd be able to do consistent reads, or consistent writes (transactions! holy cow). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_NTFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_NTFS
lou1306 9y ago
> I love it, especially using structured data instead of text for the CLI and pipes Actually, that's a main selling point for Powershell. Commandlets take and return objects, which means common operations such as filtering, sorting and formatting are quite easy.

rdiddly 9y ago

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.io.filesystemwatcher.changed(v=vs.110).aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.io.filesyste...

dgreensp 9y ago
It's not that file-watching APIs (and libraries that abstract over them and try to clean them up) don't exist, it's that they are complex and unreliable, with weak semantics. Typically an "event" is basically a notification that something happened to a file in the recent past. As noted in the remarks on that page, moving a file triggers a cascade of events, which differs depending on interactions with the computer's antivirus software. You aren't making any claims about this API, though, so there is not really anything for me to refute. If the file system operated in an event-sourcing model, you'd be able to listen to a stream of events from the OS and reconstruct the state of the file system from them. If it acted like a database, you'd be able to do consistent reads, or consistent writes (transactions! holy cow).
- zvrba 9y ago
  > If it acted like a database, you'd be able to do consistent reads, or consistent writes (transactions! holy cow). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_NTFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_NTFS

lou1306 9y ago

> I love it, especially using structured data instead of text for the CLI and pipes Actually, that's a main selling point for Powershell. Commandlets take and return objects, which means common operations such as filtering, sorting and formatting are quite easy.