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Is that so? Because the way I see it, there are a bazillion different tools, plus decades of accrued knowledge only related to massaging data into text and back
by 9dev 3y ago
Is that so? Because the way I see it, there are a bazillion different tools, plus decades of accrued knowledge only related to massaging data into text and back to structures. How many human brain cycles are wasted to data conversion on the Terminal?
Text is a lousy abstraction. It may have worked well 50 years ago when computing was limited to researchers on American universities, but the digital world back then has little in common with ours.
Acting like extending the shell to anything beyond plain text would require switching to fancy new serialisation formats every other year is a red herring. The only thing it takes is admitting a shell isn’t used on typewriters but modern computers, where humans use high-resolution screens and programs can exchange structured data. Everything else follows, and is well suited for standardisation.
But that will never happen as long as grumpy sysadmins insist that cobbling together grep and sed in some arcane incantation is the only thing we ever need.
- jampekka 3y agoWhen the alternative is to fire up some mess of an IDE with some nightmearish COM/.NET/ProtoBuf/whathaveyou overengineering marvels, I take grep and sed every time. Simple text-based structured data format (something like YAML) with possibility to embed binary would be the way to go IMHO. And of course one should be able to show graphics in the terminal. But we're not gonna get it. Open source tol is being rapidly enshittified by corporate EEE with their badly overengineered enterprise crap. :(
- 9dev 3y agoI don't know why you seem to think we can only have "super-lightweight 2kb C binary" or "giant over engineered Java-IDE" - there's lots of space in between. I don't think anybody would want to give up snappy terminals, but at the same time, why does this have to imply loosing out on half a century of user experience research??
- jampekka 3y agoThe original proposal in the thread was PowerShell+IDE. That's overengineering on top of overengineering on top of overengineering.
- feldrim 3y agoWell, that looks like a straw man fallacy. Assuming the only alternative is a full-blown enterprise IDE for a Unix shell is at least a strawman.
- jampekka 3y agoIDE on top of PowerShell was the proposal in this thread.