10 ms·

The Shell Haters Handbook

52 points by chuhnk 16y ago

adambyrtek 16y ago
It's hard to get the point of this presentation seeing only the slides. Would you mind sharing some background information?
- SkyMarshal 16y ago
  Same. FWIW, here are all the clickable links in the presentation: http://opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/ http://opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/ http://shellhaters.heroku.com/posix http://shellhaters.heroku.com/posix http://twitter.com/rtomayko http://twitter.com/rtomayko http://github.com/rtomayko http://github.com/rtomayko http://man.cx/ http://man.cx/
  - dschobel 16y ago
    That doesn't really clarify much.
- rbxbx 16y ago
  These are the slides from a presentation given by Ryan Tomayko at this years GoGaRuCo (Golden Gate Ruby Conference).
- ashleyw 16y ago
  Eventually a video of the presentation will be here: http://confreaks.net/videos/363-gogaruco2010-the-shell-hater-s-handbook?player=html http://confreaks.net/videos/363-gogaruco2010-the-shell-hater...
maxawaytoolong 16y ago
Clicking on this broke my iphone's Safari.
- 1337p337 16y ago
  You can't click, and there are no next/previous/etc. links. You have to hit space to advance to the next slide. I discovered this after much pain trying to view it on my phone, subsequently trying to view it in Firefox, then (suspecting it was Webkit-centric), Arora, and I couldn't get past the first slide. I viewed it in w3m, now suspecting Javascript oddness was at fault, and was presented with a list of keystrokes (helpfully hidden by the Javascript that runs when you hit the page). In fact, it doesn't even load the slides (which are all formatted text--HTML! The thing browsers are for viewing!) until the Javascript runs. From a quick glance at the source, it appears the culprit is some atrocity called "showoff", apparently. It would actually be easier to figure out how to view Powerpoint slides on my phone than it was to figure out how to view this thing.
  - daychilde 16y ago
    > You have to hit space to advance to the next slide. BRILLIANT design. /sarcasm
  - schacon 16y ago
    to be fair, it's meant to help give presentations. it's very specifically designed to not advance on mouse click because that allows you to use your mouse to highlight things on a slide, which I do all the time. You can use arrow keys or spacebar - I always instinctively hit the arrow keys when I see slides online, it honestly never occurred to me that anyone would click and expect the slide to advance.
jeffreyg 16y ago
Is there a way this can be designed so that I won't have to click 'back' in my browser 70 times after viewing?
- stevejohnson 16y ago
  Last time someone posted an HTML5 presentation, people complained that the back button didn't work. I guess they really can't win.
  - kd0amg 16y ago
    Sure they can: post a PDF instead.
- wazoox 16y ago
  How about going to the address bar and typing #1?
  - kgroll 16y ago
    Then he would be 71 clicks away from his original location (this page).
mahmud 16y ago
A very attractive and well justified rant. But others, with far more experience but much less aesthetic sense have been barking up that tree for 30 years. In fact, it's thanks to the lousiness of the Unix shell that we have Perl and TCL, and their progeny, Python and Ruby. People who need intellectual closure should try SCSH, which unifies the disparate worlds of procedure, builtin, operator, command, socket, file, pipe, process, thread and system call into one coherent construct: function. http://www.scsh.net/index.html http://www.scsh.net/index.html Take a look at the manual as well. The quality of technical writing and presentation are the norm in that neck of the woods. Suckage shouldn't be the status-quo. Worse is not better. Evolve!
- leif 16y ago
  Lousiness of the unix shell? The shell is beautiful and useful and not in any way lousy. It's not supposed to be a programming language, in fact, the only places it's used as such are places where it's unreasonable to expect a system will have anything else (autoconf and friends). When's the last time you used perl, tcl, python, ruby, or anything but the shell as an interactive prompt to invoke other programs? If I may: filter () { read p && echo $p || exit while read x; do if [ `expr $x % $p` != 0 ]; then echo $x fi done | filter }
  - mahmud 16y ago
    You managed to cherry-pick the few Good Parts. Question for you: what is the syntax for declaring a variable, initializing the variable, referencing the variable later, and assigning the value of that variable to another variable? ;-) Now that I have refreshed your memory, do you still insist it's not lousy? For the innocent bystanders, here is how those steps are: set var # just creating the variable .. easy # but set is a configurable command! # see your "sh" variety man for more info set var=value # no space on either side of '='! # 'value' can only be one word string, # number or character. # because single characters are # ubiquitous in nature .. # chars chars, everywhere # if you want a multiword string, use () # or "a raw string with spaces" # unless you want $ not to be expanded # then use 'raw constant string' # and if you want to run a program and # insert its output into the string .. # use "`program`" # did I say you can't put spaces around =? # eskooz me, I am just dereferencing var set newvar=$var # need a magic syntax, it's teh C ptr # unless you want the *whole* value # then you use ($var) or was it $(var)? # again, ask your sh variety manpage # I love portability # if $var isn't bound, use $?var to test # we said 'set' is a command above # so using unbound var is .. # dependant (sic) on settings # if var contains multiple words (why is that a unit # of input neway?) you can index it and count elements # with $#var and $var[i] respectively; we made everything # an external command or built in, but LENGTH and INDEX # need to be special syntax, because they're more vital # than goddamn assignment (which is fine being a builtin)
philwelch 16y ago
Since it's supposed to navigate like a manpage/less, it would be clever if j and k worked the way they do in less.
defdac 16y ago
Thank you Ryan. This will explain to all my script-kiddie-friends why I hate shells with the burning passion of a thousand suns.
cowmixtoo 16y ago
.. and this is also required reading (while we are on the topic..) http://simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf http://simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf

52 points by chuhnk 16y ago

It's hard to get the point of this presentation seeing only the slides. Would you mind sharing some background information?

SkyMarshal 16y ago
Same. FWIW, here are all the clickable links in the presentation: http://opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/ http://opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/ http://shellhaters.heroku.com/posix http://shellhaters.heroku.com/posix http://twitter.com/rtomayko http://twitter.com/rtomayko http://github.com/rtomayko http://github.com/rtomayko http://man.cx/ http://man.cx/
- dschobel 16y ago
  That doesn't really clarify much.
rbxbx 16y ago
These are the slides from a presentation given by Ryan Tomayko at this years GoGaRuCo (Golden Gate Ruby Conference).
ashleyw 16y ago
Eventually a video of the presentation will be here: http://confreaks.net/videos/363-gogaruco2010-the-shell-hater-s-handbook?player=html http://confreaks.net/videos/363-gogaruco2010-the-shell-hater...

maxawaytoolong 16y ago

Clicking on this broke my iphone's Safari.

1337p337 16y ago
You can't click, and there are no next/previous/etc. links. You have to hit space to advance to the next slide. I discovered this after much pain trying to view it on my phone, subsequently trying to view it in Firefox, then (suspecting it was Webkit-centric), Arora, and I couldn't get past the first slide. I viewed it in w3m, now suspecting Javascript oddness was at fault, and was presented with a list of keystrokes (helpfully hidden by the Javascript that runs when you hit the page). In fact, it doesn't even load the slides (which are all formatted text--HTML! The thing browsers are for viewing!) until the Javascript runs. From a quick glance at the source, it appears the culprit is some atrocity called "showoff", apparently. It would actually be easier to figure out how to view Powerpoint slides on my phone than it was to figure out how to view this thing.
- daychilde 16y ago
  > You have to hit space to advance to the next slide. BRILLIANT design. /sarcasm
- schacon 16y ago
  to be fair, it's meant to help give presentations. it's very specifically designed to not advance on mouse click because that allows you to use your mouse to highlight things on a slide, which I do all the time. You can use arrow keys or spacebar - I always instinctively hit the arrow keys when I see slides online, it honestly never occurred to me that anyone would click and expect the slide to advance.

jeffreyg 16y ago

Is there a way this can be designed so that I won't have to click 'back' in my browser 70 times after viewing?

stevejohnson 16y ago
Last time someone posted an HTML5 presentation, people complained that the back button didn't work. I guess they really can't win.
- kd0amg 16y ago
  Sure they can: post a PDF instead.
wazoox 16y ago
How about going to the address bar and typing #1?
- kgroll 16y ago
  Then he would be 71 clicks away from his original location (this page).

mahmud 16y ago

A very attractive and well justified rant. But others, with far more experience but much less aesthetic sense have been barking up that tree for 30 years. In fact, it's thanks to the lousiness of the Unix shell that we have Perl and TCL, and their progeny, Python and Ruby. People who need intellectual closure should try SCSH, which unifies the disparate worlds of procedure, builtin, operator, command, socket, file, pipe, process, thread and system call into one coherent construct: function. http://www.scsh.net/index.html http://www.scsh.net/index.html Take a look at the manual as well. The quality of technical writing and presentation are the norm in that neck of the woods. Suckage shouldn't be the status-quo. Worse is not better. Evolve!

leif 16y ago
Lousiness of the unix shell? The shell is beautiful and useful and not in any way lousy. It's not supposed to be a programming language, in fact, the only places it's used as such are places where it's unreasonable to expect a system will have anything else (autoconf and friends). When's the last time you used perl, tcl, python, ruby, or anything but the shell as an interactive prompt to invoke other programs? If I may: filter () { read p && echo $p || exit while read x; do if [ `expr $x % $p` != 0 ]; then echo $x fi done | filter }
- mahmud 16y ago
  You managed to cherry-pick the few Good Parts. Question for you: what is the syntax for declaring a variable, initializing the variable, referencing the variable later, and assigning the value of that variable to another variable? ;-) Now that I have refreshed your memory, do you still insist it's not lousy? For the innocent bystanders, here is how those steps are: set var # just creating the variable .. easy # but set is a configurable command! # see your "sh" variety man for more info set var=value # no space on either side of '='! # 'value' can only be one word string, # number or character. # because single characters are # ubiquitous in nature .. # chars chars, everywhere # if you want a multiword string, use () # or "a raw string with spaces" # unless you want $ not to be expanded # then use 'raw constant string' # and if you want to run a program and # insert its output into the string .. # use "`program`" # did I say you can't put spaces around =? # eskooz me, I am just dereferencing var set newvar=$var # need a magic syntax, it's teh C ptr # unless you want the *whole* value # then you use ($var) or was it $(var)? # again, ask your sh variety manpage # I love portability # if $var isn't bound, use $?var to test # we said 'set' is a command above # so using unbound var is .. # dependant (sic) on settings # if var contains multiple words (why is that a unit # of input neway?) you can index it and count elements # with $#var and $var[i] respectively; we made everything # an external command or built in, but LENGTH and INDEX # need to be special syntax, because they're more vital # than goddamn assignment (which is fine being a builtin)

philwelch 16y ago

Since it's supposed to navigate like a manpage/less, it would be clever if j and k worked the way they do in less.

defdac 16y ago

Thank you Ryan. This will explain to all my script-kiddie-friends why I hate shells with the burning passion of a thousand suns.

cowmixtoo 16y ago

.. and this is also required reading (while we are on the topic..) http://simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf http://simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf