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"We should be expanding our horizons beyond what 1970s programmers found convenient …" You're right; we should be going back to the Lisp and Smalltalk machines
by nrr 3y ago
"We should be expanding our horizons beyond what 1970s programmers found convenient …"
You're right; we should be going back to the Lisp and Smalltalk machines of the 1980's.
In that sense, I've found PowerShell to be something of a letdown. I was hoping for something that was an ergonomic abstraction over NT's primitives (or Linux's) and over the CLR's primitives at the same time, in much the same way that Lisp worked on Lisp machines, but PowerShell is only frustratingly alright at both.
With the deprecation of the ISE, the debugging story is also something that's pulled into question. Is the VS Code extension the place to go now?
I wind up spending more time in F# because the whip-it-upitude story is a little better there, especially with the Jupyter notebook support, and the choice of using the same debugging and development tools I use for the rest of my tech stack is an obvious one.
- pjmlp 3y agoIt still find that PowerShell is the best we have from Smalltalk/Lisp Machine kind of ideas, even if the execution could be better. Yes, the VSCode extension is the official ISE replacement. What keeps VSCode around as the only Electron app I tolerate on my own computers, is the way Microsoft is pushing it for certain workloads.
- nrr 3y ago"… even if the execution could be better." The execution could be so, so much better. I also think a lot about how some parts of PowerShell were inspired by CL on IBM i, and I find that I'm similarly frustrated when I can't just whack F4 in the middle of muddling through a command's parameters in order to be presented with a structured form interface for interactively filling out said parameters. As much as I'd really like having Genera's hoverable and clickable command listener in PowerShell (like, imagine being able to do a `Get-ChildItem` and getting back an object display that allows you to left-click on an item to run `Get-Content` on it), I'd absolutely settle for the level of interactivity and hypertextuality offered by IBM i.