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"miles ahead of Windows for research" For example, only 2 of the currently fastest 500 super computers run Windows and 1 of them is owned by Microsoft. All of t
by acadien 12y ago
"miles ahead of Windows for research"
For example, only 2 of the currently fastest 500 super computers run Windows and 1 of them is owned by Microsoft. All of the others run Linux or Unix.
"Since when are 25-year-old command-line shells research products?"
The shell is a researcher's best friend as they have always been (and will be for the foreseeable future) the direct interface between data and the user. I honestly can't think of a faster and easier way to parse a nasty 10GB log file from a simulation than bash. The fact that its old and still in use is a testament to its usefulness.
- pjmlp 12y agoREPL are way superior as shown in any Xerox PARC OS.
- yellowapple 12y agoAnd shells are indeed REPLs (in the sense that they run a loop in which they read, evaluate, and print things). Though to be fair, REPLs for languages like MATLAB or Julia are likely far more useful from a scientific standpoint than a typical shell (which is more useful for system administration).
- pjmlp 12y agoCompared with what I know from Xerox PARC documentation and what I self experienced in Oberon and Visual Works Smalltalk, shells are like REPLs yes, but not quite. It is a very different experience when the shell (e.g. Transcript in Smalltalk) is capable of interacting with the whole OS. For example in Cedar, which Oberon copied, any public function/procedure exported by dynamic libraries can be used in the shell via modulename.function. Depending on their signature they act on REPL text input, the active selected graphical element or some other OS element. While this can kind of be emulated on an UNIX shell, it breaks down that there isn't an OS wide standard API to bring everything together.
- walshemj 12y agoYou have heard of powershell?