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I appreciate your comment, although I'm honestly surprised that fish maintainers are willing to put any effort into this, considering that fish is a "modern" sh

I appreciate your comment, although I'm honestly surprised that fish maintainers are willing to put any effort into this, considering that fish is a "modern" shell which doesn't take backwards compatibility very seriously and isn't afraid of breaking with the traditional way of doing shell stuff.

aequitas 6y ago
I think it is due to personal nostalgia and technical curiosity. Solving these kind of issues are more of a hobby contrasted to real work that needs to be done on project. Thus sparking more joy and engagement.
capableweb 6y ago
Thanks! I don't know if I agree with your "doesn't take backwards compatibility very seriously" point specifically, although they do indeed try to refresh the shell UX a bit. Specifically from their design document[0], there is no mentions of backwards compatibility (except in connection to configurations), but they do mention that one of the goals is to follow posix syntax as much as possible, so seems they do have some care about backwards compatibility. And lastly, "breaking with the traditional way of doing shell stuff" doesn't necessarily mean "doesn't work on old hardware", just means that the shell UX will/can be different, but similar. - [0] https://fishshell.com/docs/current/design.html https://fishshell.com/docs/current/design.html
ComputerGuru 6y ago
> which doesn't take backwards compatibility very seriously I go out of my way to make sure fish still compiles on ancient versions of operating systems (with the most recent compiler you can get on them) and still remains functional in the kernel console (no X), and others on the team go to even further extremes. We’ve argued for weeks over changing the names of variables that might break older fish scripts, even though fish isn’t really a non-interactive scripting language. You’re going to have to qualify that statement.

aequitas 6y ago

I think it is due to personal nostalgia and technical curiosity. Solving these kind of issues are more of a hobby contrasted to real work that needs to be done on project. Thus sparking more joy and engagement.

capableweb 6y ago

Thanks! I don't know if I agree with your "doesn't take backwards compatibility very seriously" point specifically, although they do indeed try to refresh the shell UX a bit. Specifically from their design document[0], there is no mentions of backwards compatibility (except in connection to configurations), but they do mention that one of the goals is to follow posix syntax as much as possible, so seems they do have some care about backwards compatibility. And lastly, "breaking with the traditional way of doing shell stuff" doesn't necessarily mean "doesn't work on old hardware", just means that the shell UX will/can be different, but similar. - [0] https://fishshell.com/docs/current/design.html https://fishshell.com/docs/current/design.html

ComputerGuru 6y ago

> which doesn't take backwards compatibility very seriously I go out of my way to make sure fish still compiles on ancient versions of operating systems (with the most recent compiler you can get on them) and still remains functional in the kernel console (no X), and others on the team go to even further extremes. We’ve argued for weeks over changing the names of variables that might break older fish scripts, even though fish isn’t really a non-interactive scripting language. You’re going to have to qualify that statement.