7 ms·

It's an entrenched network effect. There's a lot of existing scripts written targeting POSIX shells, and there's an incentive to have all your distro maintenanc

by kemayo 9y ago

It's an entrenched network effect. There's a lot of existing scripts written targeting POSIX shells, and there's an incentive to have all your distro maintenance scripts written in one language if possible. If you want to switch your existing distro scripts to fish, you need to rewrite a lot of stuff. If you want to start a new distro, "it's written in fish!" isn't a terribly compelling selling point, since I don't think anyone is actively picking distros based on their tooling language. For the general devops case, there's a lot of existing example code out there for bash scripts, and far less for fish. "How do I do X in bash?" is probably going to get you a decent example on Stack Overflow. Devops (I feel) cares a bit more about the installed-everywhere thing, and fish isn't a standard part of most distros. Oil having a goal of being completely sh/bash compatible gives it much greater odds of something like Debian switching to it, since it wouldn't carry huge technical debt along with it.

toyg 9y ago
> I don't think anyone is actively picking distros based on their tooling language. I would use the crap out of a Linux distribution built in python.
- Insanity 9y ago
  yeah I can actually imagine that. like using an IDE based on the language it was written in to extend and tweak it more easily, or a window manager etc.. actually now you mentioned it, barring possible performance issues I'd also like a Python distro
  - rollcat 9y ago
    > an IDE based on the language it was written in I recommend Emacs. Maybe not as a daily driver (it's a matter of preference), but for the experience. I recommend at least a month with it, make sure to write some original Lisp code for your customisations. (You WILL end up customizing it, the defaults are crap.) > or a window manager I recommend Awesome. The core is in C, but that's basically the low-level stuff, the actual WM is written in Lua. If you'd start with an empty init file, you'd have a moderately sized side-project on your hands to put something usable together. But if you'd start from the stock rc, there's a world of endless tweaking and customisation waiting for you... Watch out, both Emacs and Awesome are rabbit holes.
    - kqr 9y ago
      Wait, what? You recommend Emacs but not StumpWM? I've used -- for longer periods of time, of course -- Awesome, Xmonad, i3, and dwm; while some of them are better at some things than StumpWM, StumpWM is the only one that provides an Emacs, live-hackable experience. So these days, I strongly prefer that.
      - racer-v 9y ago
        I've been hearing about Emacs X Window Manager but haven't given it a shot yet https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm
    - sedachv 9y ago
      > the defaults are crap As someone who has recently joined the 1k LOC Emacs configuration file club, I have to disagree. The default settings are a well thought out starting point that needs minimal tweaking to get to exactly where you want. I try out a lot of packages on ELPA, and many that purport to provide alternatives for defaults end up being inferior to using the defaults with some small tweaks. The convenient thing is that you can customize the third-party packages in the same way and just use the parts you like from them. The other good thing about Emacs is that you don't need a separate window manager[1], and you don't need to use a separate command shell (Emacs comes with eshell), or to use a terminal emulator for SSHing into remote machines (eshell over TRAMP is absolutely amazing), or a file manager (Emacs comes with dired, which works over TRAMP which is amazing), or a... [1] https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm
      - Scarbutt 9y ago
        eshell over TRAMP? how does that work?
        sedachv 9y ago
        Any pathname in eshell can be a TRAMP pathname on a remote machine. So you just cd to a remote directory and eshell will run commands on the remote machine. You can redirect remote command output to a local file, local command output to a remote file, cp from remote pathname on machine A to remote pathname on machine B, etc.
  - throwaway7645 9y ago
    Early Smalltalk and Lisp systems were those langs all the way down. Using emacs with Common Lisp or using Pharo Smalltalk can give you a feel for this, but not exactly the same thing as a Symbolics lisp machine or the Xerox Alto. Alan Kay has a presentation where he shows the entire OS, word processor, networking stuff, IDE, paint programs...etc was an insanely small amount of code and everything was user configurable. I really wish that had caught on more. I really enjoy Linux (although it ain't perfect). Using Windows and trying to interactively do anything with the OS is an exercise in pain and frustration. If someone could build a modern machine with an OS that is like that and had a few basic apps (web browser...etc), I would be quite happy.
    - terminalcommand 9y ago
      I don't know if it's just me, but I don't feel like I'm using a computer when using Windows. After using OpenBSD exclusively for weeks (my laptop broke, so I had to repurpose an old netbook with OpenBSD), I felt bored and limited in Windows. I tried Powershell, but -mostly because I don't know much about it- it didn't give the same feeling. The thing that is working for me is to explore VB.net . It is really an interesting language with many historical features. I've noticed that all the languages I use (Python, C#, Java, Go, etc.) distracted me from the essence of programming. When I started programming I immidiately thought about patterns, architecture, unit-tests, integration-test etc. In VB.net I feel like I'm slowly reexperiencing the joy I've felt in my earlier days of programming.
      - chaotic_clanger 9y ago
        you can turn windows into an adult computer by using cygwin (maybe mingw), autohotkey and something like window manager. the illusion is almost real, because sometimes i also run linux in vmware/docker/... and when i am not paying attention i forget easily which os i am on. the unix subsystem for win is quite boring as you can't mix windows applications with linux ones, for example running visual studio build from bash. powershell would be probably worth learning, if i'd have to, but i do not. it may be godsend to win sysadmins though, as classic cmd is a 40 year old joke.
  - whyever 9y ago
    IIRC, Python performance is better than than bash.
    - solarkraft 9y ago
      Not in my tests involving repeated invocation of binaries, iirc.
- racer-v 9y ago
  Gentoo is basically this. I learned Python by writing .ebuilds (their package format is a short Python script that downloads and builds whatever software you're installing).
  - PuercoPop 9y ago
    Although emerge is written in python, Afaik ebuilds are bash scripts.
    - racer-v 9y ago
      Ah right you are, thanks - I remember learning Python and switching to Gentoo about the same time, but as David Hume warned us, it's hard to infer causality from proximity.
- sedachv 9y ago
  It could happen: https://github.com/dcantrell/pycoreutils https://github.com/dcantrell/pycoreutils https://github.com/davidfischer/pycoreutils https://github.com/davidfischer/pycoreutils http://u-root.tk/ http://u-root.tk/ does that for Go.
- chriswarbo 9y ago
  Not Python, but GuixSD is built around (Guile) Scheme, from the package manager (Guix) to the init system (shepherd).
- Aissen 9y ago
  Pardus existed. Many distros have bits of python used here and there.
eikenberry 9y ago
The fact that there is the POSIX standard and multiple shells that meet that standard is also a big part of it. If you write in a POSIX compatible shell language you know it can run anywhere. Fish, for example, has no standard and only 1 implementation. Any new shell that hopes to compete in the systems space will have to be POSIX compliant. At least until there is a new widely adopted shell standard.

by kemayo 9y ago

toyg 9y ago

> I don't think anyone is actively picking distros based on their tooling language. I would use the crap out of a Linux distribution built in python.

Insanity 9y ago
yeah I can actually imagine that. like using an IDE based on the language it was written in to extend and tweak it more easily, or a window manager etc.. actually now you mentioned it, barring possible performance issues I'd also like a Python distro
- rollcat 9y ago
  > an IDE based on the language it was written in I recommend Emacs. Maybe not as a daily driver (it's a matter of preference), but for the experience. I recommend at least a month with it, make sure to write some original Lisp code for your customisations. (You WILL end up customizing it, the defaults are crap.) > or a window manager I recommend Awesome. The core is in C, but that's basically the low-level stuff, the actual WM is written in Lua. If you'd start with an empty init file, you'd have a moderately sized side-project on your hands to put something usable together. But if you'd start from the stock rc, there's a world of endless tweaking and customisation waiting for you... Watch out, both Emacs and Awesome are rabbit holes.
  - kqr 9y ago
    Wait, what? You recommend Emacs but not StumpWM? I've used -- for longer periods of time, of course -- Awesome, Xmonad, i3, and dwm; while some of them are better at some things than StumpWM, StumpWM is the only one that provides an Emacs, live-hackable experience. So these days, I strongly prefer that.
    - racer-v 9y ago
      I've been hearing about Emacs X Window Manager but haven't given it a shot yet https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm
  - sedachv 9y ago
    > the defaults are crap As someone who has recently joined the 1k LOC Emacs configuration file club, I have to disagree. The default settings are a well thought out starting point that needs minimal tweaking to get to exactly where you want. I try out a lot of packages on ELPA, and many that purport to provide alternatives for defaults end up being inferior to using the defaults with some small tweaks. The convenient thing is that you can customize the third-party packages in the same way and just use the parts you like from them. The other good thing about Emacs is that you don't need a separate window manager[1], and you don't need to use a separate command shell (Emacs comes with eshell), or to use a terminal emulator for SSHing into remote machines (eshell over TRAMP is absolutely amazing), or a file manager (Emacs comes with dired, which works over TRAMP which is amazing), or a... [1] https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm
    - Scarbutt 9y ago
      eshell over TRAMP? how does that work?
      - sedachv 9y ago
        Any pathname in eshell can be a TRAMP pathname on a remote machine. So you just cd to a remote directory and eshell will run commands on the remote machine. You can redirect remote command output to a local file, local command output to a remote file, cp from remote pathname on machine A to remote pathname on machine B, etc.
- throwaway7645 9y ago
  Early Smalltalk and Lisp systems were those langs all the way down. Using emacs with Common Lisp or using Pharo Smalltalk can give you a feel for this, but not exactly the same thing as a Symbolics lisp machine or the Xerox Alto. Alan Kay has a presentation where he shows the entire OS, word processor, networking stuff, IDE, paint programs...etc was an insanely small amount of code and everything was user configurable. I really wish that had caught on more. I really enjoy Linux (although it ain't perfect). Using Windows and trying to interactively do anything with the OS is an exercise in pain and frustration. If someone could build a modern machine with an OS that is like that and had a few basic apps (web browser...etc), I would be quite happy.
  - terminalcommand 9y ago
    I don't know if it's just me, but I don't feel like I'm using a computer when using Windows. After using OpenBSD exclusively for weeks (my laptop broke, so I had to repurpose an old netbook with OpenBSD), I felt bored and limited in Windows. I tried Powershell, but -mostly because I don't know much about it- it didn't give the same feeling. The thing that is working for me is to explore VB.net . It is really an interesting language with many historical features. I've noticed that all the languages I use (Python, C#, Java, Go, etc.) distracted me from the essence of programming. When I started programming I immidiately thought about patterns, architecture, unit-tests, integration-test etc. In VB.net I feel like I'm slowly reexperiencing the joy I've felt in my earlier days of programming.
    - chaotic_clanger 9y ago
      you can turn windows into an adult computer by using cygwin (maybe mingw), autohotkey and something like window manager. the illusion is almost real, because sometimes i also run linux in vmware/docker/... and when i am not paying attention i forget easily which os i am on. the unix subsystem for win is quite boring as you can't mix windows applications with linux ones, for example running visual studio build from bash. powershell would be probably worth learning, if i'd have to, but i do not. it may be godsend to win sysadmins though, as classic cmd is a 40 year old joke.
- whyever 9y ago
  IIRC, Python performance is better than than bash.
  - solarkraft 9y ago
    Not in my tests involving repeated invocation of binaries, iirc.
racer-v 9y ago
Gentoo is basically this. I learned Python by writing .ebuilds (their package format is a short Python script that downloads and builds whatever software you're installing).
- PuercoPop 9y ago
  Although emerge is written in python, Afaik ebuilds are bash scripts.
  - racer-v 9y ago
    Ah right you are, thanks - I remember learning Python and switching to Gentoo about the same time, but as David Hume warned us, it's hard to infer causality from proximity.
sedachv 9y ago
It could happen: https://github.com/dcantrell/pycoreutils https://github.com/dcantrell/pycoreutils https://github.com/davidfischer/pycoreutils https://github.com/davidfischer/pycoreutils http://u-root.tk/ http://u-root.tk/ does that for Go.
chriswarbo 9y ago
Not Python, but GuixSD is built around (Guile) Scheme, from the package manager (Guix) to the init system (shepherd).
Aissen 9y ago
Pardus existed. Many distros have bits of python used here and there.

eikenberry 9y ago

The fact that there is the POSIX standard and multiple shells that meet that standard is also a big part of it. If you write in a POSIX compatible shell language you know it can run anywhere. Fish, for example, has no standard and only 1 implementation. Any new shell that hopes to compete in the systems space will have to be POSIX compliant. At least until there is a new widely adopted shell standard.