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When the replacement of bash comes it will seem like a complete 'no-brainer'. In my opinion what should be happening is they should completely decouple the engi

When the replacement of bash comes it will seem like a complete 'no-brainer'. In my opinion what should be happening is they should completely decouple the engineering from the interactive shell. The shell should just be a series of aliases and shorthands translating into something more robust. But I also think they should move away from plain text for everything as well. Almost everything in a unix system could be better served with some kind of standard system of typing. Config files, program inputs (give universal tab completion) ... etc. So I tried powershell and found it to be terrible. It seems like the implementation is killing the idea, stack traces all over the place - rather than helpful errors - and different types for file system objects (I cannot quite remember exactly what) making it hard to combine operations.

metaobject 9y ago
Perhaps it seems superficial, but one of the reasons I don't like PowerShell is because the language is ugly. There is something about using capital letters for commands that really bothers me. It may be an OCD thing, bc I use lower-case snake_case for all variable/class names in Lisp, C, C++, and Python. I don't usually do any work on Windows, but when something came up where some scripting had to be done, I just installed the Cygwin and was done with it.
humanrebar 9y ago
> Almost everything in a unix system could be better served with some kind of standard system of typing. Lightly typed data (like strings you must parse) is more future proof at the expense of leaving more potential for bugs (escaping whitespace). Strongly typing requires the shell designers to provide more opinions. More opinions provide more opportunities to be wrong about what needs we will have in the future decades.
dotancohen 9y ago
It sounds to me like you would be happy with a python3 REPL that automatically 'import's certain libraries. I don't know if it is possible to configure the REPL like that, but you could probably script it!
- krab 9y ago
  That's possible with a PYTHONSTARTUP file. https://docs.python.org/3.6/using/cmdline.html#envvar-PYTHONSTARTUP https://docs.python.org/3.6/using/cmdline.html#envvar-PYTHON...
- falcolas 9y ago
  I actually worked with someone who did exactly this: they replaced their bash shell with the python shell. It took them a year to get it comfortably working, and they were constantly tweaking on it, but it did work. Some tasks were harder, some easier, but it was all quite entertaining to see.

metaobject 9y ago

Perhaps it seems superficial, but one of the reasons I don't like PowerShell is because the language is ugly. There is something about using capital letters for commands that really bothers me. It may be an OCD thing, bc I use lower-case snake_case for all variable/class names in Lisp, C, C++, and Python. I don't usually do any work on Windows, but when something came up where some scripting had to be done, I just installed the Cygwin and was done with it.

humanrebar 9y ago

> Almost everything in a unix system could be better served with some kind of standard system of typing. Lightly typed data (like strings you must parse) is more future proof at the expense of leaving more potential for bugs (escaping whitespace). Strongly typing requires the shell designers to provide more opinions. More opinions provide more opportunities to be wrong about what needs we will have in the future decades.

dotancohen 9y ago

It sounds to me like you would be happy with a python3 REPL that automatically 'import's certain libraries. I don't know if it is possible to configure the REPL like that, but you could probably script it!

krab 9y ago
That's possible with a PYTHONSTARTUP file. https://docs.python.org/3.6/using/cmdline.html#envvar-PYTHONSTARTUP https://docs.python.org/3.6/using/cmdline.html#envvar-PYTHON...
falcolas 9y ago
I actually worked with someone who did exactly this: they replaced their bash shell with the python shell. It took them a year to get it comfortably working, and they were constantly tweaking on it, but it did work. Some tasks were harder, some easier, but it was all quite entertaining to see.