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0 pointslaumars10y ago0 comments

I suspect your argument is now more about personal preference than anything. So I'll just address a few specific points you've raise:

> Generally this is all awful and low-level. Just see the UI interface difference between 'dd' and 'Copy File' on a Lisp Machine. The UI is worlds away.

Well yeah, I did already example `dd` as an inconsistency. :)

> You can do that on a Lisp Machine, too. With the difference that no pipelining of text is necessary. Just reuse the objects. The data is all fully object-oriented and self identifying.

Indeed you can. As you can also with DOS, Powershell and so forth. I wasn't suggesting that UNIX shells were unique (though I can see how it might read that way), but that it was UNIX shells which pioneered that concept. For all their faults and the technology that might have superseded it: the idea of pipelining reusable blocks of code was a genius idea for its era.

Powershell also supports passing objects like Lisp does. Personally I prefer the dumb approach; however in all other aspects of programming I do prefer strongly typed languages. This is just personal preference.

> The shell does not know the various options the command takes. The shell does not know what the types and the syntax of the options is. The shell does not know which options can be combined and which not. It can't prompt for shell options. It can't check the command syntax before calling it. It can't provide any help when the syntax is wrong. It can't deal with errors during command execution. There is no in-context help. It can't reusing prior commands other that just editing them on a textual base. The output of the command is just text and not structured data. There are really really zillions of problems.

This part isn't accurate. The original Bourne shell cannot but bash, zsh and fish can all do all of the above. Albeit sometimes (particularly with Bash) you need to install additional helper routines that aren't always shipped / configured with the default package. I believe csh also supports most if not all of the above too.

I'm sure lisp does it better, but I was never arguing that UNIX shells are better Lisp to begin with. Just that I believe Bash et al to have a lower barrier of entry than Lisp. I think on that specific point we might have to agree to disagree - but I don't see many non-programmers using Lisp and this is why I think Bash has a lower barrier of entry (to go back to my original point).

I can completely understand and relate to why you enjoy working inside a Lisp REPL shell though.

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lispm10y ago

> I'm sure lisp does it better

Lisp does nothing. It is a programming language.

> Just that I believe Bash et al to have a lower barrier of entry than Lisp

I doubt that, given how horrible Bash as a language and as a shell is. There is no reason why there can't be more sane command systems and better shell languages.

See the zsh documentation on completion:

http://zsh.sourceforge.net/Guide/zshguide06.html

This is all totally over the head of the average user.

     _perforce_revisions() {
        local rline match mbegin mend pfx
        local -a rl

        pfx=${${(Q)PREFIX}%%\#*}
        compset -P '*\#'

        # Numerical revision numbers, possibly with text.
        if [[ -z $PREFIX || $PREFIX = <-> ]]; then
            # always allowed (same as none)
            rl=($rl 0)
            _call_program filelog p4 filelog \$pfx 2>/dev/null |
               while read rline; do
                if [[ $rline = (#b)'... #'(<->)*\'(*)\' ]]; then
                    rl=($l "${match[1]}:${match[2]}")
                fi
            done
        fi
        # Non-numerical (special) revision names.
        if [[ -z $PREFIX || $PREFIX != <-> ]]; then
            rl=($rl 'head:head revision' 'none:empty revision'
                    'have:current synced revision')
        fi
        _describe -t revisions 'revision' rl
      }

Tell me that this piece of code has a 'low barrier of entry' or even a 'lower barrier of entry'. It's just that a generation of experts has been self selected to find that usable.

> but I was never arguing that UNIX shells are better Lisp to begin with

I was not talking about Lisp. I was talking about software. One could write much better command shells in C than what Unix shells offers. I understand that certain people find Unix like shells attractive. From a general user interface perspective they are horrible.

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