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Sure but the problem is that Solaris/AIX will be very slow to actually install it, so you can't count on it being there, and those distros DO influence things l

Sure but the problem is that Solaris/AIX will be very slow to actually install it, so you can't count on it being there, and those distros DO influence things like autoconf and configure scripts. And people who run them pay big money contracts to get those distros supported (one bank contract for support is worth much more than 10,000 linux users who don't pay anyone a dime). The inertia is very real, bigger than you even think, and you can't wave it off by suggesting they don't influence computing. At any rate, you need to actually accomplish everyone on Linux and BSD having that available and having used it for the past 10 years first. And get the core distros switching over to using it so that the glue code in the distro is all YSH plus probably python and some legacy sh. Actually show me that. And yeah, I think the analogy of trying to change English to Esperanto is about right. I learned about Esperanto in the mid-80s...

chubot 3y ago
Shell is used A LOT -- for data science, machine learning, cloud, CI, putting together Linux distros / boostrapping, embedded systems, and other heterogeneous problems. configure is one use case. And autoconf in particular will probably be around forever, regardless of the existence of Solaris/AIX -- for the simple reason that many old and important packages like coreutils use autoconf. Probably nobody is going to rewrite the coreutils build system soon. (coreutils might be rewritten/obsolete before that happens!) The good news is that OSH can run configure scripts as-is :) It's actually easy to run them, because they are meant to run on many different shells. --- It's also not a binary yes/no thing. Cobol and Fortran aren't dead, but people choose to write new projects in different languages now, and that's good! I had an entire career without seeing any Cobol at all. Zero. Likewise OSH can run POSIX configure scripts forever (and those same configure scripts can be run by /bin/sh and bash) But I think lots of people will choose to write brand new YSH scripts as well. The computing world is only getting more heterogeneous (in both time and space). Shell accomodates that, and Oils is designed to accomodate that.

chubot 3y ago

Shell is used A LOT -- for data science, machine learning, cloud, CI, putting together Linux distros / boostrapping, embedded systems, and other heterogeneous problems. configure is one use case. And autoconf in particular will probably be around forever, regardless of the existence of Solaris/AIX -- for the simple reason that many old and important packages like coreutils use autoconf. Probably nobody is going to rewrite the coreutils build system soon. (coreutils might be rewritten/obsolete before that happens!) The good news is that OSH can run configure scripts as-is :) It's actually easy to run them, because they are meant to run on many different shells. --- It's also not a binary yes/no thing. Cobol and Fortran aren't dead, but people choose to write new projects in different languages now, and that's good! I had an entire career without seeing any Cobol at all. Zero. Likewise OSH can run POSIX configure scripts forever (and those same configure scripts can be run by /bin/sh and bash) But I think lots of people will choose to write brand new YSH scripts as well. The computing world is only getting more heterogeneous (in both time and space). Shell accomodates that, and Oils is designed to accomodate that.