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> A whole bunch of things: I appreciate the clarity of your message... curiously enough all the things that you mention I see them as anti-features of nushell

> A whole bunch of things: I appreciate the clarity of your message... curiously enough all the things that you mention I see them as anti-features of nushell (except the first one) 1. Posix shell is clunky has its limitations but there's nothing really flawed about it. It is nice to have non-posix shells, though; in that I agree with you. 2. I hate hate hate the very concept of dataframes. They seem like a useless over-engineering. Plain tabular data is a perfect, and the columns of a table are always named 1, 2, 3. The whole point of abstraction is that you do not care about the meaning of the columns of your table, and the programs (like the lovely awk) that deal with these columns do not care either. There's nothing more "orthogonal" than that: filters that do not understand the data but can filter it anyway. 3. syntax highlighting is a very personal issue; in my case I prefer my terminal not to look like a christmas tree. 4. xargs is one of my favorite tools (alongside gnu make and gnu parallel) and there's nothing "unserious" about it. The happiest moments in my programming life are when I get to use these tools. Not using xargs sounds like a nightmare! 5. Rust is definitely an anti-feature to me: it's like a language that was built by picking the worst features of many already ugly languages. I would not really care in what language the shell is written, but I'd rather have it written in saner, "unsafe" languages.

nerdponx 5y ago
I strongly disagree about data frames. I am a data scientist professionally, and I think the data frame is one of the most important programming abstractions I use.
duckerude 5y ago
> Posix shell is clunky has its limitations but there's nothing really flawed about it. I think shellcheck is the best argument against this. POSIX shell is just stuffed to the brim with weird gotchas, places where the obvious way to write something causes subtle bugs down the line. It's the only programming language I use that feels adversarial, where you have to be paranoid to properly solve simple tasks. (Admittedly some of that is because of the reliance on system programs rather than the shell language itself.)
- enriquto 5y ago
  > It's the only programming language I use that feels adversarial This may be just that you are not very used to the language. I have the same dreadful feeling (that the language fights against me), even when using languages that I'm reasonably proficient with. For example, in C++, a simple expression like "y = f(x);" already gives me the chills... Is the () operator overloaded? and the assignement operator? If the object x has size equal to 10GB, and y is supposed to have the same size, how much memory does this operation require? 10GB? 20GB? 30GB? 40GB? each of these completely different answers is perfectly reasonable, depending on extremely delicate details of the implementation. Garbage-collected languages are even worse, I never know whether they will start a memory reclaiming spree that will halt my program for a few seconds. Even in python, I have this sort of jump scares a few times per month.

nerdponx 5y ago

I strongly disagree about data frames. I am a data scientist professionally, and I think the data frame is one of the most important programming abstractions I use.

duckerude 5y ago

> Posix shell is clunky has its limitations but there's nothing really flawed about it. I think shellcheck is the best argument against this. POSIX shell is just stuffed to the brim with weird gotchas, places where the obvious way to write something causes subtle bugs down the line. It's the only programming language I use that feels adversarial, where you have to be paranoid to properly solve simple tasks. (Admittedly some of that is because of the reliance on system programs rather than the shell language itself.)

enriquto 5y ago
> It's the only programming language I use that feels adversarial This may be just that you are not very used to the language. I have the same dreadful feeling (that the language fights against me), even when using languages that I'm reasonably proficient with. For example, in C++, a simple expression like "y = f(x);" already gives me the chills... Is the () operator overloaded? and the assignement operator? If the object x has size equal to 10GB, and y is supposed to have the same size, how much memory does this operation require? 10GB? 20GB? 30GB? 40GB? each of these completely different answers is perfectly reasonable, depending on extremely delicate details of the implementation. Garbage-collected languages are even worse, I never know whether they will start a memory reclaiming spree that will halt my program for a few seconds. Even in python, I have this sort of jump scares a few times per month.