3 ms·
Yes and no. Learning UNIX is a bit like learning LISP - the parentheses don't look "exteremely pleasant" but having (1) a shared serialization format (2) commo
by cben 6y ago
Yes and no. Learning UNIX is a bit like learning LISP - the parentheses don't look "exteremely pleasant" but having (1) a shared serialization format (2) common programmatic interface (3) a culture of REPLs makes everything much more discoverable and gives you power you would never get where each interface is a shiny bespoke thing.
There a lot of kludges, especially around teletypes/terminals, yes. But the common interchange format being ~ASCII~ UTF-8 makes learning the ins and outs way more pleasant than if everything gets connected by COM, .dll APIs, inscrutable .inf files or whatever Microsoft thinks up at a given decade (you can notice I've stayed away for a while)...
Now Excel stands aside as as environment where learning _was_ pleasant, everything had an inspectable representation and a shared interface! Despite arrays bounds and reuse-by-copy-paste being messy, spreadsheets remain a sweet spot of bringing power to "low-code" users. I didn't look into this specific project enough to say where falls on lock-in-vs-interoperability scale, but IMHO the world needs more "spreadsheet plus" experimentation so I wish them the best...