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This feels extremely like PowerShell, from all the examples, and even cites "draws inspiration from projects like PowerShell", so "a new type of shell" feels ve

This feels extremely like PowerShell, from all the examples, and even cites "draws inspiration from projects like PowerShell", so "a new type of shell" feels very disingenuous unless it has additional novel properties that aren't evident just from these. There's also no support for variables yet if the page is to be believed, which means there's 0 chance of me using this for more than 5 minutes right now. (I'm not trying to say this project isn't worthwhile, just that many other people in the thread currently seem to be entirely uncritical.)

gexla 5y ago
https://github.com/nushell/nushell#progress https://github.com/nushell/nushell#progress "Nu supports variables and environment variables"
- rincebrain 5y ago
  That page was edited an hour ago, so that was presumably a stale example. I'm glad to be wrong!
jupp0r 5y ago
Have you used PowerShell much? The examples in the Readme make it obvious that it's very different (in a good way).
- rincebrain 5y ago
  I use PowerShell daily, though I do not, for example, develop nontrivial modules for it. Could you provide an example of what I'm overlooking?
- brushfoot 5y ago
  I use PowerShell extensively, and there are no significant differences in the README examples. They're basically rebranded PowerShell statements. I see minor syntax differences, for example in the comparison operators. Nothing that would it would be worth losing the .NET BCL or PowerShell's cmdlets for.
kstenerud 5y ago
> This feels extremely like PowerShell, from all the examples, and even cites "draws inspiration from projects like PowerShell", so "a new type of shell" feels very disingenuous unless it has additional novel properties that aren't evident just from these. There's HN-style nitpicking, and then there's this.
- rincebrain 5y ago
  I'm sorry, but I'm not actually sure what you're trying to express here. My initial interpretation is that this is a level beyond typical nitpicking, but I'm not sure how that follows?
  - kstenerud 5y ago
    "A new type of shell" is a bit of marketing text to express the fact that this shell doesn't follow in the footsteps of most other shells (bash, zsh, fish, etc) in terms of treating things as blobs of text (which allows for a number of innovations). The fact that the author even states that it's partially inspired by Powershell demonstrates that he's aware of the similarities (and has in fact cribbed many ideas from it). Calling his marketing line "disingenuous" comes across as very petty nitpicking that adds nothing of value to the discussion.
    - rincebrain 5y ago
      Ah, I see. Thank you for explaining. The part that bothered me was not that they described something that shared some concepts with PowerShell as "a new kind", but that I did not see any illustration of entirely novel features in the examples that followed. As a sibling comment remarked, they feel I'm quite mistaken, and there are very positive distinctions illustrated in the examples, but I took a look at them again, and it's still not clear to me what they mean. I think I don't see why it's unreasonable for something which advertises cross-platform support to be compared to common shells on all those platforms, not just originally-*ix ones? That is, I think it's totally reasonable for you to think the tagline is justified solely by the differences in those shells, even if I disagree, but I don't see why you think it's unreasonable for me to hold this view?
Macha 5y ago
I think to most people who've only used as Powershell as "That windows shell with the blue background and built in unixy aliases", getting into Powershell itself still qualifies as a "new type of shell", so I'm willing to extend that credit to other shells trying the same paradigm.
- rincebrain 5y ago
  I'd agree that getting into PS from cmd counts as a new paradigm, or that getting into Nushell without Powershell experience is as well (based on the examples), but at the point where PS has been shipped with Windows by default for many years now, and Nushell runs natively on Windows, I think it's reasonable to disagree with a claim of "a new kind of shell". I also think it's reasonable for people to say it's justified - there's certainly, as you and others have remarked, a decent argument to be made for that. But for me, "different from many common shells, but all the same functionality has been bundled in one shell before"* strongly violates my expectations for "new kind of shell". * - I am not trying to definitively state they have no new functionality, I absolutely have not dug in deep enough, just that I did not see any examples of it, which I would have expected prominently.
mattbee 5y ago
I came here to say something similar. The question I need answered in the README is - why would I invest time in learning this instead of Powershell? My muscle memory for bash is pretty strong, but when I have to do Windowsy stuff, I end up picking up a little bit more Powershell each time and find it pretty neat. So I'd be interested to know what it does differently, and couldn't find that answer.
uglycoyote 5y ago
I took it to mean that it was a new type of shell from the perspective of unix/osx users who were presumably their target audience, and who are an audience who might either not know what PowerShell is about our discount it is just a "windows thing" and therefore not relevant to their life. So "new" in the sense of "new to you". You could probably point to just about any technology that claims to be new and pull it apart and find that it is mostly derivative of existing technology and ideas
- rincebrain 5y ago
  Sure, all work is theft, for some value of theft, but as I've said in a couple of other replies: * "all these ideas have been done before, in various places" is one thing, "all these ideas have been done before in one program in the same role on all the same platforms" makes me feel like "new [to users who haven't used this other thing shipped with the OS for years on one of the platforms]" is insufficient to use without more explicit qualifiers * I may be oblivious and missing some cool example, but the flip side to "all ideas implemented before" is "no new tricks", and when someone describes something to me as "a new type of X", I really expect at least one novel thing or composition of things to be present. After all, I wouldn't describe TIFF as a "new type of image format" just because many people who haven't touched photo/graphics editing probably haven't encountered it, or IE4 as "a new type of web browser" (now) just because a significant fraction of internet users are not old enough to have used it when it had market share. (When it was first released, Active Desktop, for example, while a security nightmare, was indeed a new thing for almost all users.)

gexla 5y ago

https://github.com/nushell/nushell#progress https://github.com/nushell/nushell#progress "Nu supports variables and environment variables"

rincebrain 5y ago
That page was edited an hour ago, so that was presumably a stale example. I'm glad to be wrong!

jupp0r 5y ago

Have you used PowerShell much? The examples in the Readme make it obvious that it's very different (in a good way).

rincebrain 5y ago
I use PowerShell daily, though I do not, for example, develop nontrivial modules for it. Could you provide an example of what I'm overlooking?
brushfoot 5y ago
I use PowerShell extensively, and there are no significant differences in the README examples. They're basically rebranded PowerShell statements. I see minor syntax differences, for example in the comparison operators. Nothing that would it would be worth losing the .NET BCL or PowerShell's cmdlets for.

kstenerud 5y ago

> This feels extremely like PowerShell, from all the examples, and even cites "draws inspiration from projects like PowerShell", so "a new type of shell" feels very disingenuous unless it has additional novel properties that aren't evident just from these. There's HN-style nitpicking, and then there's this.

rincebrain 5y ago
I'm sorry, but I'm not actually sure what you're trying to express here. My initial interpretation is that this is a level beyond typical nitpicking, but I'm not sure how that follows?
- kstenerud 5y ago
  "A new type of shell" is a bit of marketing text to express the fact that this shell doesn't follow in the footsteps of most other shells (bash, zsh, fish, etc) in terms of treating things as blobs of text (which allows for a number of innovations). The fact that the author even states that it's partially inspired by Powershell demonstrates that he's aware of the similarities (and has in fact cribbed many ideas from it). Calling his marketing line "disingenuous" comes across as very petty nitpicking that adds nothing of value to the discussion.
  - rincebrain 5y ago
    Ah, I see. Thank you for explaining. The part that bothered me was not that they described something that shared some concepts with PowerShell as "a new kind", but that I did not see any illustration of entirely novel features in the examples that followed. As a sibling comment remarked, they feel I'm quite mistaken, and there are very positive distinctions illustrated in the examples, but I took a look at them again, and it's still not clear to me what they mean. I think I don't see why it's unreasonable for something which advertises cross-platform support to be compared to common shells on all those platforms, not just originally-*ix ones? That is, I think it's totally reasonable for you to think the tagline is justified solely by the differences in those shells, even if I disagree, but I don't see why you think it's unreasonable for me to hold this view?

Macha 5y ago

I think to most people who've only used as Powershell as "That windows shell with the blue background and built in unixy aliases", getting into Powershell itself still qualifies as a "new type of shell", so I'm willing to extend that credit to other shells trying the same paradigm.

rincebrain 5y ago
I'd agree that getting into PS from cmd counts as a new paradigm, or that getting into Nushell without Powershell experience is as well (based on the examples), but at the point where PS has been shipped with Windows by default for many years now, and Nushell runs natively on Windows, I think it's reasonable to disagree with a claim of "a new kind of shell". I also think it's reasonable for people to say it's justified - there's certainly, as you and others have remarked, a decent argument to be made for that. But for me, "different from many common shells, but all the same functionality has been bundled in one shell before"* strongly violates my expectations for "new kind of shell". * - I am not trying to definitively state they have no new functionality, I absolutely have not dug in deep enough, just that I did not see any examples of it, which I would have expected prominently.

mattbee 5y ago

I came here to say something similar. The question I need answered in the README is - why would I invest time in learning this instead of Powershell? My muscle memory for bash is pretty strong, but when I have to do Windowsy stuff, I end up picking up a little bit more Powershell each time and find it pretty neat. So I'd be interested to know what it does differently, and couldn't find that answer.

uglycoyote 5y ago

I took it to mean that it was a new type of shell from the perspective of unix/osx users who were presumably their target audience, and who are an audience who might either not know what PowerShell is about our discount it is just a "windows thing" and therefore not relevant to their life. So "new" in the sense of "new to you". You could probably point to just about any technology that claims to be new and pull it apart and find that it is mostly derivative of existing technology and ideas

rincebrain 5y ago
Sure, all work is theft, for some value of theft, but as I've said in a couple of other replies: * "all these ideas have been done before, in various places" is one thing, "all these ideas have been done before in one program in the same role on all the same platforms" makes me feel like "new [to users who haven't used this other thing shipped with the OS for years on one of the platforms]" is insufficient to use without more explicit qualifiers * I may be oblivious and missing some cool example, but the flip side to "all ideas implemented before" is "no new tricks", and when someone describes something to me as "a new type of X", I really expect at least one novel thing or composition of things to be present. After all, I wouldn't describe TIFF as a "new type of image format" just because many people who haven't touched photo/graphics editing probably haven't encountered it, or IE4 as "a new type of web browser" (now) just because a significant fraction of internet users are not old enough to have used it when it had market share. (When it was first released, Active Desktop, for example, while a security nightmare, was indeed a new thing for almost all users.)