5 ms·

I remember Windows NT being a bit of all right -- if I recall correctly, it was based on the Mach kernel as OSX is[was?]. One real historical criticism I have

I remember Windows NT being a bit of all right -- if I recall correctly, it was based on the Mach kernel as OSX is[was?]. One real historical criticism I have of Windows is that it took them until Win10 to make bash available. They really ought to have, at minimum, aliased a lot more bash commands to Powershell 'cmdlets'. It used to be so frustrating, having to look up all their weird, verbose commands.

_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
My understanding is the the Windows NT was influenced by the design of the Mach kernel, but it certainly wasn't itself the Mach kernel. I have a vague recollection of a discussion of some of the NT kernel designers being old Multics people (so that most of the extant OSes are in same way or other influenced by Multics). But I've never enjoyed using any of the versions of DOS/Windows. I surely would have gone into computer science if my experience in late high school/university hadn't been almost exclusively Windows (in contrast to my earlier experience with Atari computers).
AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
Windows NT was designed by some DEC people with lessons learned from VMS, though certain microkernel-like aspects of it were influenced by Mach. > They really ought to have, at minimum, aliased a lot more bash commands to Powershell 'cmdlets'. First of all, I am of the opinion that PowerShell is significantly superior to bash+coreutils in many ways. If you took a step back from your familiarity with the UNIX stack and looked at it objectively, you might come to the same conclusion. Anyway, I think aliasing bash commands to cmdlets at all was a mistake, because it creates the impression that they are compatible in some way, when they often function very very differently. > It used to be so frustrating, having to look up all their weird, verbose commands. They're verbose because they are descriptive. When you write scripts, this is an advantage. When you're not writing scripts, PowerShell has a lot of built-in short aliases you can use (gci => Get-ChildItem), and you're free to define your own at will. This is in addition to tab completion of cmdlets, variables, and argument names.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
  > PowerShell is significantly superior to bash+coreutils in many ways Presumably it should be, given that PowerShell came out in 2006, while Bash appeared in 1989 and is tied to the model of Bourne shell which appeared in 1977 which itself was tied to the model of the Thompson shell of 1971. Which means that traditional UNIX terminal environments have certain artificial limitations which are tied to these earlier paradigms.
  - JdeBP 8y ago
    Newer implying better is a bad presumption. Don't compare on dates. Compare on architecture and design.
    - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
      That's not what I meant. I haven't used PowerShell enough to have an opinion on it, but in theory the designers of PowerShell would have had the opportunity to observe text-based shells of the past and improve upon the paradigm. (For instance, I prefer using eshell to a traditional terminal, because eshell [in addition to giving the user access to Lisp as an additional scripting/interface language] it is not only the 'command line' part of the buffer which accepts input, but potentially other parts of the buffer; you can use Plan 9 style terminal features; cd to multiple directories simultaneously etc..)

_emacsomancer_ 8y ago

My understanding is the the Windows NT was influenced by the design of the Mach kernel, but it certainly wasn't itself the Mach kernel. I have a vague recollection of a discussion of some of the NT kernel designers being old Multics people (so that most of the extant OSes are in same way or other influenced by Multics). But I've never enjoyed using any of the versions of DOS/Windows. I surely would have gone into computer science if my experience in late high school/university hadn't been almost exclusively Windows (in contrast to my earlier experience with Atari computers).

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago

Windows NT was designed by some DEC people with lessons learned from VMS, though certain microkernel-like aspects of it were influenced by Mach. > They really ought to have, at minimum, aliased a lot more bash commands to Powershell 'cmdlets'. First of all, I am of the opinion that PowerShell is significantly superior to bash+coreutils in many ways. If you took a step back from your familiarity with the UNIX stack and looked at it objectively, you might come to the same conclusion. Anyway, I think aliasing bash commands to cmdlets at all was a mistake, because it creates the impression that they are compatible in some way, when they often function very very differently. > It used to be so frustrating, having to look up all their weird, verbose commands. They're verbose because they are descriptive. When you write scripts, this is an advantage. When you're not writing scripts, PowerShell has a lot of built-in short aliases you can use (gci => Get-ChildItem), and you're free to define your own at will. This is in addition to tab completion of cmdlets, variables, and argument names.

_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
> PowerShell is significantly superior to bash+coreutils in many ways Presumably it should be, given that PowerShell came out in 2006, while Bash appeared in 1989 and is tied to the model of Bourne shell which appeared in 1977 which itself was tied to the model of the Thompson shell of 1971. Which means that traditional UNIX terminal environments have certain artificial limitations which are tied to these earlier paradigms.
- JdeBP 8y ago
  Newer implying better is a bad presumption. Don't compare on dates. Compare on architecture and design.
  - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
    That's not what I meant. I haven't used PowerShell enough to have an opinion on it, but in theory the designers of PowerShell would have had the opportunity to observe text-based shells of the past and improve upon the paradigm. (For instance, I prefer using eshell to a traditional terminal, because eshell [in addition to giving the user access to Lisp as an additional scripting/interface language] it is not only the 'command line' part of the buffer which accepts input, but potentially other parts of the buffer; you can use Plan 9 style terminal features; cd to multiple directories simultaneously etc..)