4 ms·

The current Unix command line situation is on the one hand "incredible useful" and on the other hand "broken by design". Why is it incredible useful? Just ima

by ceving 3y ago

The current Unix command line situation is on the one hand "incredible useful" and on the other hand "broken by design". Why is it incredible useful? Just imagine how long it would take to write the following in C or Rust: curl -sS https://go.dev/doc/devel/release | html2text | grep -o -P '\bgo\d+\.\d+\.\d+\b' | sort -V | uniq | tail -1 Why is it broken by design? Read this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29747034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29747034 The problem: a command line interface must be human readable and machine readable at the same time. There is no canonical way to solve this problem.

shadowgovt 3y ago
> Why is it broken by design? I think your example self-explains why it's broken by design. It's a good example. > a command line interface must be human readable and machine readable at the same time. There is no canonical way to solve this problem. And you know, there could be one. Apple has Human Interface Guidelines to reify the meaning of the visual abstractions in its desktop UI. The problem is that the command line didn't come from people who think like Apple designers; it came from people who think "How can I express what I want using the least code possible, because laziness, impatience, and hubris are virtues?" And they weren't wrong for the time (especially because every byte matters), but the design decisions they made got baked into tooling that can't now be moved. I think at this point we'd have to punt the POSIX toolchain to get something better; it's hard for me to imagine how we'd build discoverable, conceptually-consistent UX atop what we currently have.
- ceving 3y ago
  I think graphical user interfaces are no high standard. They do not compose. How would you express a loop or a recursion in a graphical user interface?
  - shadowgovt 3y ago
    They are a challenge for composition, often. Great for discoverability though, and that doesn't require graphics, just context. There should be a button I can push in my shell that lets me ask "what does the token at cursor mean," and a button that lets me type a plain language search string that wires down to a contextual search (i.e. I'm in the middle of typing out "grep" I should be able to ask "how do I search folders?"). We didn't have the tools to build this when grep was invented; we have them now.
  - samatman 3y ago
    I'm genuinely unsure how to translate your question into, hmm. Anything actually. The snarky answer is "By writing it in source code, in a GUI text editor", a thing I do frequently. But the problem is that I have no idea what you're getting at in the first place, so that's just an attempt to recover some meaning from what you wrote.
    - shadowgovt 3y ago
      Shells allow one to pipe around the data flowing from called process to called process in a very smooth and transparent fashion. By and large, GUIs do not. There is no such thing as a universal shell for GUIs, and attempts to layer automation atop the GUI abstraction are generally spotty and unreliable (certainly when compared to CLI and shells). This is both for technical reasons (i.e. it's much easier to clearly delineate the two ends of a pipe than to clearly delineate "I want to click on the red square inside the 'diagram' window inside the drawing app") and for ecosystem reasons (since GUIs aren't thought of as automatable, GUI designers are free to move pieces around version-to-version of software, making it extremely challenging to describe a GUI structurally). I've seen some neat attempts at GUI automation (Sikuli is my favorite) but it's never been a core feature like it is in the CLIs-glued-together-by-shells world.
      - samatman 3y ago
        CLIs are in the modern world a subset of GUI programs which run inside a text-oriented window, and plenty of more sophisticated GUI programs can be directed textually, with macros or short scripts, and/or have a command-line component for doing that sort of pipe or batch-oriented work. Yeah, sometimes there's functionality stuck behind a button or menu select which I want exposed in a more textual way, in macOS that's when you break out Automator, Alfred, or Hammerspoon (the only one I've ever used fwiw), Linux and Windows have their own equivalents. I don't think the distinction you're pointing to is nearly so stark or clear-cut as it's often made out to be. Ecosystems converge towards the tasks which are amenable to batching and pipelining being equipped to do so.
        3y ago
- rascul 3y ago
  > I think at this point we'd have to punt the POSIX toolchain to get something better; it's hard for me to imagine how we'd build discoverable, conceptually-consistent UX atop what we currently have. Posix could potentially do this. It already has a bit about conventions and could be expanded. Problem is getting things to adhere to it, plus I doubt the posix authors could be convinced to add a lot more to it. https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap12.html https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1...
ta8645 3y ago
> The problem: a command line interface must be human readable and machine readable at the same time. Since the computer is there to serve us, ultimately the solution must be for the machine to read as well as humans.
- oblio 3y ago
  What if the ultimate solution is only achieved after our lifetimes?
  - ta8645 3y ago
    I don't really understand the question. Nobody got to fly until we figured out how to build airplanes, people before that lived on the ground. Likewise, we'll live with iterations on the current command line, until AI is fully integrated with it.
- ceving 3y ago
  Never ever. Humans are idiots. If you build machines like humans you will get idiotic machines. Machines need to do things exactly right and not almost right or mostly right. Current AI trends will not create better machines, just more idiotic machines. Those idiotic machines will be sufficient to impress idiots, but they will not help to do things exactly right. Automated theorem proving is the only way to build better machines.
  - ta8645 3y ago
    > Automated theorem proving is the only way to build better machines. Sure, but that will just be one aspect of an integrated and wholistic AI, which can configure the parameters input to the automated theorem proving component, and act on the results.
  - samatman 3y ago
    Automated theorem proving will only ever be an arrow in the quiver, because even in theory, the space of useful computer programs is a vast superset of those which may have all their properties formally verified. In practice, it's a much larger superset than theory allows. Growing the space of formally verifiable subprograms is a worthy endeavor, sure, but so is good old-fashioned engineering.
friendzis 3y ago
> The problem: a command line interface must be human readable and machine readable at the same time. There is no canonical way to solve this problem. * Powershell has entered the chat
- riddley 3y ago
  Powershell has some cool things, but it's a disaster when it comes to usability.
  - adamrezich 3y ago
    how so?
    - niutech 3y ago
      Possibly due to overly verbose cmdlet names e.g. `Get-TrustAuthorityKeyProviderClientCertificateCSR`.
PurpleRamen 3y ago
> The problem: a command line interface must be human readable and machine readable at the same time. There is no canonical way to solve this problem. It's not really the "same time". Usually, human and machine use the same command, but at different times. And there are many ways to enable different outputs, even at the same time. But this all depends on having some standard which everyone follows. And that's where it becomes complicated.
avgcorrection 3y ago
The article covers this. Special machine-readable output modes like `--json`.
BlueTemplar 3y ago
Your example not only doesn't prove that it's broken by design (only broken most of the time ?), it even seems to give a (relatively ?) easy way to fix it ? > Since very few implementations of ls allow you to terminate filenames with NUL characters instead of newlines In fact the solution to this issue seems to be so obvious that I might be missing something ? (Rejection by shell interfaces for some reason ??)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
n_plus_1_acc 3y ago
If you assume a similar set of primitives, it could be as simple as html2text(get("https://go.dev/doc/devel/release")).find_all("\bgo\d+\.\d+\.\d+\b").sorted().unique().last() It's just that Rust is designed to be more robust in exchange for stricter Compiler time checks.
hi41 3y ago
Could you please explain what that command does.

by ceving 3y ago

shadowgovt 3y ago

> Why is it broken by design? I think your example self-explains why it's broken by design. It's a good example. > a command line interface must be human readable and machine readable at the same time. There is no canonical way to solve this problem. And you know, there could be one. Apple has Human Interface Guidelines to reify the meaning of the visual abstractions in its desktop UI. The problem is that the command line didn't come from people who think like Apple designers; it came from people who think "How can I express what I want using the least code possible, because laziness, impatience, and hubris are virtues?" And they weren't wrong for the time (especially because every byte matters), but the design decisions they made got baked into tooling that can't now be moved. I think at this point we'd have to punt the POSIX toolchain to get something better; it's hard for me to imagine how we'd build discoverable, conceptually-consistent UX atop what we currently have.

ceving 3y ago
I think graphical user interfaces are no high standard. They do not compose. How would you express a loop or a recursion in a graphical user interface?
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  They are a challenge for composition, often. Great for discoverability though, and that doesn't require graphics, just context. There should be a button I can push in my shell that lets me ask "what does the token at cursor mean," and a button that lets me type a plain language search string that wires down to a contextual search (i.e. I'm in the middle of typing out "grep" I should be able to ask "how do I search folders?"). We didn't have the tools to build this when grep was invented; we have them now.
- samatman 3y ago
  I'm genuinely unsure how to translate your question into, hmm. Anything actually. The snarky answer is "By writing it in source code, in a GUI text editor", a thing I do frequently. But the problem is that I have no idea what you're getting at in the first place, so that's just an attempt to recover some meaning from what you wrote.
  - shadowgovt 3y ago
    Shells allow one to pipe around the data flowing from called process to called process in a very smooth and transparent fashion. By and large, GUIs do not. There is no such thing as a universal shell for GUIs, and attempts to layer automation atop the GUI abstraction are generally spotty and unreliable (certainly when compared to CLI and shells). This is both for technical reasons (i.e. it's much easier to clearly delineate the two ends of a pipe than to clearly delineate "I want to click on the red square inside the 'diagram' window inside the drawing app") and for ecosystem reasons (since GUIs aren't thought of as automatable, GUI designers are free to move pieces around version-to-version of software, making it extremely challenging to describe a GUI structurally). I've seen some neat attempts at GUI automation (Sikuli is my favorite) but it's never been a core feature like it is in the CLIs-glued-together-by-shells world.
    - samatman 3y ago
      CLIs are in the modern world a subset of GUI programs which run inside a text-oriented window, and plenty of more sophisticated GUI programs can be directed textually, with macros or short scripts, and/or have a command-line component for doing that sort of pipe or batch-oriented work. Yeah, sometimes there's functionality stuck behind a button or menu select which I want exposed in a more textual way, in macOS that's when you break out Automator, Alfred, or Hammerspoon (the only one I've ever used fwiw), Linux and Windows have their own equivalents. I don't think the distinction you're pointing to is nearly so stark or clear-cut as it's often made out to be. Ecosystems converge towards the tasks which are amenable to batching and pipelining being equipped to do so.
      - 3y ago
rascul 3y ago
> I think at this point we'd have to punt the POSIX toolchain to get something better; it's hard for me to imagine how we'd build discoverable, conceptually-consistent UX atop what we currently have. Posix could potentially do this. It already has a bit about conventions and could be expanded. Problem is getting things to adhere to it, plus I doubt the posix authors could be convinced to add a lot more to it. https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap12.html https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1...

ta8645 3y ago

> The problem: a command line interface must be human readable and machine readable at the same time. Since the computer is there to serve us, ultimately the solution must be for the machine to read as well as humans.

oblio 3y ago
What if the ultimate solution is only achieved after our lifetimes?
- ta8645 3y ago
  I don't really understand the question. Nobody got to fly until we figured out how to build airplanes, people before that lived on the ground. Likewise, we'll live with iterations on the current command line, until AI is fully integrated with it.
ceving 3y ago
Never ever. Humans are idiots. If you build machines like humans you will get idiotic machines. Machines need to do things exactly right and not almost right or mostly right. Current AI trends will not create better machines, just more idiotic machines. Those idiotic machines will be sufficient to impress idiots, but they will not help to do things exactly right. Automated theorem proving is the only way to build better machines.
- ta8645 3y ago
  > Automated theorem proving is the only way to build better machines. Sure, but that will just be one aspect of an integrated and wholistic AI, which can configure the parameters input to the automated theorem proving component, and act on the results.
- samatman 3y ago
  Automated theorem proving will only ever be an arrow in the quiver, because even in theory, the space of useful computer programs is a vast superset of those which may have all their properties formally verified. In practice, it's a much larger superset than theory allows. Growing the space of formally verifiable subprograms is a worthy endeavor, sure, but so is good old-fashioned engineering.

friendzis 3y ago

> The problem: a command line interface must be human readable and machine readable at the same time. There is no canonical way to solve this problem. * Powershell has entered the chat

riddley 3y ago
Powershell has some cool things, but it's a disaster when it comes to usability.
- adamrezich 3y ago
  how so?
  - niutech 3y ago
    Possibly due to overly verbose cmdlet names e.g. `Get-TrustAuthorityKeyProviderClientCertificateCSR`.

PurpleRamen 3y ago

> The problem: a command line interface must be human readable and machine readable at the same time. There is no canonical way to solve this problem. It's not really the "same time". Usually, human and machine use the same command, but at different times. And there are many ways to enable different outputs, even at the same time. But this all depends on having some standard which everyone follows. And that's where it becomes complicated.

avgcorrection 3y ago

The article covers this. Special machine-readable output modes like `--json`.

BlueTemplar 3y ago

Your example not only doesn't prove that it's broken by design (only broken most of the time ?), it even seems to give a (relatively ?) easy way to fix it ? > Since very few implementations of ls allow you to terminate filenames with NUL characters instead of newlines In fact the solution to this issue seems to be so obvious that I might be missing something ? (Rejection by shell interfaces for some reason ??)

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

n_plus_1_acc 3y ago

If you assume a similar set of primitives, it could be as simple as html2text(get("https://go.dev/doc/devel/release")).find_all("\bgo\d+\.\d+\.\d+\b").sorted().unique().last() It's just that Rust is designed to be more robust in exchange for stricter Compiler time checks.

hi41 3y ago

Could you please explain what that command does.