4 ms·

The strength of these tools is that they are the lowest common denominator. I don't need to worry about `ls` not fitting in an 80 character terminal because its

The strength of these tools is that they are the lowest common denominator. I don't need to worry about `ls` not fitting in an 80 character terminal because its devs "haven't owned a device in the last decade with a screen resolution less than 1920x1080". I don't need to worry about `find` not working because it can't resolve DNS. I know when I SSH into my router, my raspberry pi running pi hole or emulation, my laptop, and my server that my `#!/bin/sh` script works exactly the same. It was so, so hard to get here. Imagine chaos so maddening that autotools was somehow an improvement. > The problem is that we cater for the absolute lowest common denominator and completely eschew the vast vast majority of people who don’t require that feature. Not for nothing, but for most people in the world computers and internet access are an unaffordable luxury. I'm typing this on a machine that cost me $3,700, and in some ways I'm sympathetic to what you're saying. But average world GDP per capita is something like $12,500. Electricity isn't free. Internet access isn't free. Before we start making arguments about catering to the 1% of people fortunate enough to use the fastest machines and networks, we should consider who our actions may close the door on.

SilverRubicon 2y ago
> But average world GDP per capita is something like $12,500. Electricity isn't free. Internet access isn't free. These people are big users of the command line?
- camgunz 2y ago
  If you read on, you'll find that my point is that if even the most basic apps (CLIs and TUIs) have hefty system requirements, we stand little chance expanding the use of computers to the average person. I'm not sure what your point is though.
maccard 2y ago
> The strength of these tools is that they are the lowest common denominator. I disagree - the strength is that they're standardised. The weakness is that those standards are ancient. > Not for nothing, but for most people in the world computers and internet access are an unaffordable luxury. I Are we really doing "there's starving children in africa"? There's a vast, vast middleground between a western developer with a stack of multi-thousand dollar devices with low latency ssh access, and someone in a rural village in kenya using a 2g sim card on a 25 year old OS. The line shouldn't be "you need an ARM Macbook to run a terminal", but maybe, just maybe we could realise that pretty much any device it possible to buy and run a shell on in the last 20 years is not restricted to being driven by control codes, and that I'd wager pretty much every device that is actually using a terminal emulator sold in the last 18 years (I'm going to draw the line at 2006 when Core2Duo appeared) has had an amount of hardware that was just not considered 35 years ago when they were designed.
- camgunz 2y ago
  > I disagree - the strength is that they're standardised. The weakness is that those standards are ancient. Which standards do you have a problem with? Handling terminal escape codes is pretty easy; dozens of terminal emulators do it great. Are you saying it should be easier to build a TUI? It's already very easy: just use a library like Textualize or Bubbletea or rview (there are also dozens of these). I'm not saying every TUI app performs great, but maybe you remember an article that made it to the HN front page about how centering in web apps is impossible? Or how web apps can't both confine text to a reasonable center column of text and take full advantage of all the screen space when a browser window is fully maximized on a wide monitor? TUIs don't have a monopoly on layout weirdness is all I'm saying here. > Are we really doing "there's starving children in africa"? Feel free to correct me here, but it sounds like your point is that we should move the baseline from what was prevalent in the 70s to what was prevalent ~2006. I'd love to hear some examples of what you think that would enable beyond what we currently have, because thinking about it, I'm not coming up with too many that wouldn't really irritate me. Maybe tab completion could query external services because we have pretty fast networks and CDNs now, but I don't always have internet, and I'm not thrilled by the idea of my ISP knowing whenever I try to tab complete a Docker image or whatever. Maybe we could cache it, but I'm not wild about every tool I use keeping its own cache or history database. Maybe we could have big beautiful TUIs, in fact we already do, but I prefer to have a lot of splits in my terminal and therefore like it when things work fine at 80 columns. So I can't think of significant improvements, but on the other hand I can easily envision this being a bigger barrier to expanding computer/internet use to more humans. Or to be maybe too frank about it, I'm completely fine with you being annoyed by yet another Unicode or layout bug if 1,000 more people--let's just say in rural Washington--get the chance to be charmed by Linux.
  - maccard 2y ago
    > Handling terminal escape codes is pretty easy; dozens of terminal emulators do it great And yet some of the most common ones fail - here’s a thread about VSCode from this morning. https://x.com/thdxr/status/1833727037074227603?s=46 https://x.com/thdxr/status/1833727037074227603?s=46 > just use a library like Textualize or Bubbletea or rview (there are also dozens of these) I’m more of a user of these TUI apps, so I don’t have control over what framework they use. > Feel free to correct me here, but it sounds like your point is that we should move the baseline from what was prevalent in the 70s to what was prevalent ~2006. We should move the baseline to represent how computers are used today. That might be 2004 or 2008, I don’t really care. One really perfect example of crazy behaviour that is still widespread is “tools that dump binary data to terminal emulators that are parsed as escape codes and cause the emulator to hang” - there are dozens of these foot guns, and removing these surprise behaviours would be far more likely to help those 1000 people in rural Washington than letting them run a terminal on a device that is possibly from before they were born. > I'd love to hear some examples of what you think that would enable beyond what we currently have I think the fact that we serialize everything to text to allow interoperability between tools is insane in this day and age. We spend so much computing time on this. Powershell has it right. The fact that in my hands I have a device that is many orders of magnitude faster than the device I first wrote code on (and this phone is probably an order of magnitude weaker than my primary workstation) and we’re still waiting for basic operations on files because of APIs and programs that were designed in the 80s when we needed to page text files > I'm completely fine with you being annoyed by yet another Unicode or layout bug if 1,000 more people--let's just say in rural Washington--get the chance to be charmed by Linux. One of the earliest memories I have of programming is having a computer say hello to me, and printing ascii art. I’d guess GenZ is far more familiar with Unicode than with ascii art, and there are millions of people out there with non-ascii characters in their names - shouldn’t they be able to have the same access that we do, or are we saying g that only poor Americans are entitled to have that magic?

SilverRubicon 2y ago

> But average world GDP per capita is something like $12,500. Electricity isn't free. Internet access isn't free. These people are big users of the command line?

camgunz 2y ago
If you read on, you'll find that my point is that if even the most basic apps (CLIs and TUIs) have hefty system requirements, we stand little chance expanding the use of computers to the average person. I'm not sure what your point is though.

maccard 2y ago

> The strength of these tools is that they are the lowest common denominator. I disagree - the strength is that they're standardised. The weakness is that those standards are ancient. > Not for nothing, but for most people in the world computers and internet access are an unaffordable luxury. I Are we really doing "there's starving children in africa"? There's a vast, vast middleground between a western developer with a stack of multi-thousand dollar devices with low latency ssh access, and someone in a rural village in kenya using a 2g sim card on a 25 year old OS. The line shouldn't be "you need an ARM Macbook to run a terminal", but maybe, just maybe we could realise that pretty much any device it possible to buy and run a shell on in the last 20 years is not restricted to being driven by control codes, and that I'd wager pretty much every device that is actually using a terminal emulator sold in the last 18 years (I'm going to draw the line at 2006 when Core2Duo appeared) has had an amount of hardware that was just not considered 35 years ago when they were designed.

camgunz 2y ago
> I disagree - the strength is that they're standardised. The weakness is that those standards are ancient. Which standards do you have a problem with? Handling terminal escape codes is pretty easy; dozens of terminal emulators do it great. Are you saying it should be easier to build a TUI? It's already very easy: just use a library like Textualize or Bubbletea or rview (there are also dozens of these). I'm not saying every TUI app performs great, but maybe you remember an article that made it to the HN front page about how centering in web apps is impossible? Or how web apps can't both confine text to a reasonable center column of text and take full advantage of all the screen space when a browser window is fully maximized on a wide monitor? TUIs don't have a monopoly on layout weirdness is all I'm saying here. > Are we really doing "there's starving children in africa"? Feel free to correct me here, but it sounds like your point is that we should move the baseline from what was prevalent in the 70s to what was prevalent ~2006. I'd love to hear some examples of what you think that would enable beyond what we currently have, because thinking about it, I'm not coming up with too many that wouldn't really irritate me. Maybe tab completion could query external services because we have pretty fast networks and CDNs now, but I don't always have internet, and I'm not thrilled by the idea of my ISP knowing whenever I try to tab complete a Docker image or whatever. Maybe we could cache it, but I'm not wild about every tool I use keeping its own cache or history database. Maybe we could have big beautiful TUIs, in fact we already do, but I prefer to have a lot of splits in my terminal and therefore like it when things work fine at 80 columns. So I can't think of significant improvements, but on the other hand I can easily envision this being a bigger barrier to expanding computer/internet use to more humans. Or to be maybe too frank about it, I'm completely fine with you being annoyed by yet another Unicode or layout bug if 1,000 more people--let's just say in rural Washington--get the chance to be charmed by Linux.
- maccard 2y ago
  > Handling terminal escape codes is pretty easy; dozens of terminal emulators do it great And yet some of the most common ones fail - here’s a thread about VSCode from this morning. https://x.com/thdxr/status/1833727037074227603?s=46 https://x.com/thdxr/status/1833727037074227603?s=46 > just use a library like Textualize or Bubbletea or rview (there are also dozens of these) I’m more of a user of these TUI apps, so I don’t have control over what framework they use. > Feel free to correct me here, but it sounds like your point is that we should move the baseline from what was prevalent in the 70s to what was prevalent ~2006. We should move the baseline to represent how computers are used today. That might be 2004 or 2008, I don’t really care. One really perfect example of crazy behaviour that is still widespread is “tools that dump binary data to terminal emulators that are parsed as escape codes and cause the emulator to hang” - there are dozens of these foot guns, and removing these surprise behaviours would be far more likely to help those 1000 people in rural Washington than letting them run a terminal on a device that is possibly from before they were born. > I'd love to hear some examples of what you think that would enable beyond what we currently have I think the fact that we serialize everything to text to allow interoperability between tools is insane in this day and age. We spend so much computing time on this. Powershell has it right. The fact that in my hands I have a device that is many orders of magnitude faster than the device I first wrote code on (and this phone is probably an order of magnitude weaker than my primary workstation) and we’re still waiting for basic operations on files because of APIs and programs that were designed in the 80s when we needed to page text files > I'm completely fine with you being annoyed by yet another Unicode or layout bug if 1,000 more people--let's just say in rural Washington--get the chance to be charmed by Linux. One of the earliest memories I have of programming is having a computer say hello to me, and printing ascii art. I’d guess GenZ is far more familiar with Unicode than with ascii art, and there are millions of people out there with non-ascii characters in their names - shouldn’t they be able to have the same access that we do, or are we saying g that only poor Americans are entitled to have that magic?