3 ms·

As someone who almost exclusively uses tmux and vim (as I spend my life in numerous terminals...), what would you recommend instead? Unless this is /s in which

by exdsq 7y ago

As someone who almost exclusively uses tmux and vim (as I spend my life in numerous terminals...), what would you recommend instead? Unless this is /s in which case it has gone straight over my head!

carapace 7y ago
Nah, "I'm seriously you guys." Look, I use vim and tmux too. When they work, they work well, no doubt. It's when they break, like in TFA, that the trouble starts. Recall that the terminal is a glorified refried teleprinter with more archeological layers than the Grand Canyon and more fossils than a natural history museum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleprinter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleprinter My point was that other professions advance the state of the art of their tools. We're still using vacuum tubes and steam. Those are cool but it's not cool that nothing better is being adopted. Using terminals in 2020 is like LARPing steampunk (at work with a straight face.) We get away with it because the newfangled crap (Eclipse, etc. Heck, I use VScode but half of what I do is still in the embedded terminal emulator!) is just not better. This can't be the best we can do, can it? And yet, where are the alternatives? Well... > what would you recommend instead? I can't recommend them because nothing highly superior has reached mass adoption. But they exist (in the sense that they exist or did exist or could exist) like Jef Raskin's Cat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat (Canon killed the Cat. Heh. Wah.) Have you ever used the old Oberon OS? (Oberon emulator in browser: https://schierlm.github.io/OberonEmulator/emu.html?image=FullDiskImageWithSource&width=1024&height=576 https://schierlm.github.io/OberonEmulator/emu.html?image=Ful... ) Oberon OS (plus the "Gadgets" widget system) represents a fundamentally better UI metaphor than the terminal. Heck Smalltalk et. al. (E.g. Pharo) with their portable VMs and platform-agnostic pixel-identical GUIs are a better abstraction than UNIX+TTY, eh? https://pharo.org/ https://pharo.org/ (Maybe that "Dark" thingy will be cool: https://darklang.com/ https://darklang.com/ )
- pavel_lishin 7y ago
  I hear and understand your complaints about the tools we use now, but I don't think you can say they're unprofessional when the only alternatives you offer are tools that don't exist because people didn't use them.
  - scroot 7y ago
    > the only alternatives you offer are tools that don't exist because people didn't use them They may not have wide adoption, but the tools he's describing very much exist. Wirth even published a book that describes how to implement an Oberon system from top to bottom, hardware (fpga) up to UI. Systems like Symbolics, Smalltalk, Oberon, etc. all took lots of free time and funding to develop. Today's computing culture it dominated by next-quarter, short-term, profit seeking imperatives more than it was when these systems (along with the key systems we use today in production) were created. That leaves us in a bind: we have no choice but to merely iterate on what already exists and what's already available -- I'm talking about nix systems here mostly. FOSS is a bit of a negative in this regard. Armies of interested programmers working in their free time are certainly not going to be able to invent things like Oberon or Smalltalk. You need to be properly funded and have the time to come up with things. The big companies aren't really interesting in doing this either -- they can just use existing FOSS, or even pay their own people to support a project, and build on top of that. It's not surprising, then, that no one has invented a wholly new personal computing system in decades. Our current culture is, in my view, somewhat similar to medieval scholasticism. We are going to endlessly churn the the FOSS/nix soup until there is some kind of revolution in thought or action.
  - carapace 7y ago
    Well, FWIW, Pharo certainly exists and people use it (not me, but some people); and while IMO it's too soon to say anything concrete about Dark lang concerning its uptake/adoption, it does exist and some people are using it. But what I'm saying is the very absence of better tools in common use (in 2020!) is telling. IMO it's unprofessional that e.g. type inference is only coming to mainstream languages/frameworks in the last decade or so. ML is over forty years old! Or check out the "new representation of conditional logic called schematic tables" in Jon Edwards' Subtext experimental language/IDE ( http://www.subtext-lang.org/ http://www.subtext-lang.org/ https://vimeo.com/140738254 https://vimeo.com/140738254 ) Something like that would be very useful if it was integrated into IDEs but it's barely known, eh? Instead we concentrate on creating bold new flavors of C++, Python, Java, Javascript, or even Dart, Swift, Go, etc... or ReasonML, Typescript, ... I can't even keep going. You know what I mean. We play with toys, for a living. It's unprofessional. ;-)

by exdsq 7y ago

As someone who almost exclusively uses tmux and vim (as I spend my life in numerous terminals...), what would you recommend instead? Unless this is /s in which case it has gone straight over my head!

carapace 7y ago

Nah, "I'm seriously you guys." Look, I use vim and tmux too. When they work, they work well, no doubt. It's when they break, like in TFA, that the trouble starts. Recall that the terminal is a glorified refried teleprinter with more archeological layers than the Grand Canyon and more fossils than a natural history museum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleprinter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleprinter My point was that other professions advance the state of the art of their tools. We're still using vacuum tubes and steam. Those are cool but it's not cool that nothing better is being adopted. Using terminals in 2020 is like LARPing steampunk (at work with a straight face.) We get away with it because the newfangled crap (Eclipse, etc. Heck, I use VScode but half of what I do is still in the embedded terminal emulator!) is just not better. This can't be the best we can do, can it? And yet, where are the alternatives? Well... > what would you recommend instead? I can't recommend them because nothing highly superior has reached mass adoption. But they exist (in the sense that they exist or did exist or could exist) like Jef Raskin's Cat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat (Canon killed the Cat. Heh. Wah.) Have you ever used the old Oberon OS? (Oberon emulator in browser: https://schierlm.github.io/OberonEmulator/emu.html?image=FullDiskImageWithSource&width=1024&height=576 https://schierlm.github.io/OberonEmulator/emu.html?image=Ful... ) Oberon OS (plus the "Gadgets" widget system) represents a fundamentally better UI metaphor than the terminal. Heck Smalltalk et. al. (E.g. Pharo) with their portable VMs and platform-agnostic pixel-identical GUIs are a better abstraction than UNIX+TTY, eh? https://pharo.org/ https://pharo.org/ (Maybe that "Dark" thingy will be cool: https://darklang.com/ https://darklang.com/ )

pavel_lishin 7y ago
I hear and understand your complaints about the tools we use now, but I don't think you can say they're unprofessional when the only alternatives you offer are tools that don't exist because people didn't use them.
- scroot 7y ago
  > the only alternatives you offer are tools that don't exist because people didn't use them They may not have wide adoption, but the tools he's describing very much exist. Wirth even published a book that describes how to implement an Oberon system from top to bottom, hardware (fpga) up to UI. Systems like Symbolics, Smalltalk, Oberon, etc. all took lots of free time and funding to develop. Today's computing culture it dominated by next-quarter, short-term, profit seeking imperatives more than it was when these systems (along with the key systems we use today in production) were created. That leaves us in a bind: we have no choice but to merely iterate on what already exists and what's already available -- I'm talking about nix systems here mostly. FOSS is a bit of a negative in this regard. Armies of interested programmers working in their free time are certainly not going to be able to invent things like Oberon or Smalltalk. You need to be properly funded and have the time to come up with things. The big companies aren't really interesting in doing this either -- they can just use existing FOSS, or even pay their own people to support a project, and build on top of that. It's not surprising, then, that no one has invented a wholly new personal computing system in decades. Our current culture is, in my view, somewhat similar to medieval scholasticism. We are going to endlessly churn the the FOSS/nix soup until there is some kind of revolution in thought or action.
- carapace 7y ago
  Well, FWIW, Pharo certainly exists and people use it (not me, but some people); and while IMO it's too soon to say anything concrete about Dark lang concerning its uptake/adoption, it does exist and some people are using it. But what I'm saying is the very absence of better tools in common use (in 2020!) is telling. IMO it's unprofessional that e.g. type inference is only coming to mainstream languages/frameworks in the last decade or so. ML is over forty years old! Or check out the "new representation of conditional logic called schematic tables" in Jon Edwards' Subtext experimental language/IDE ( http://www.subtext-lang.org/ http://www.subtext-lang.org/ https://vimeo.com/140738254 https://vimeo.com/140738254 ) Something like that would be very useful if it was integrated into IDEs but it's barely known, eh? Instead we concentrate on creating bold new flavors of C++, Python, Java, Javascript, or even Dart, Swift, Go, etc... or ReasonML, Typescript, ... I can't even keep going. You know what I mean. We play with toys, for a living. It's unprofessional. ;-)