Gates 0. Stallman 1.
November 30th, 2006Tonight, I downloaded darth vader. Tonight, I was lured to the dark side. But I prevailed… with unexpected help.
To to shock of many I presume, I joined forces with my arch-nemesis… not Microsoft, but Emacs. Back in-the-day, Stallman (co)developed emacs, named after “editing macros”, and wisely chose the letter ‘e’ as a prefix because no other program at the time consumed the “e” namespace. So typing e-TAB woud result in your-favorite-editor. simple. intuitive. genius.
Then why on green earth would some programmers at microsoft decide that powershell commands should “intuitively” contain hyphenated words as commands. Hello World! Do you peck type as well? Does it hurt your ring finger to be stroking instead of scrolling? Does productivity hurt? Can you say Tab-Complete before the hyphen? Your interface design requires the rest of us productivity hounds to type “LeftShift-RightIndexFinger-NumberRow-UpperRight” for each-and-every command. You have GOT to be KIDDING me!!! Sure, “Powershell supports TAB-Complete”, you say. But you have to type up to the hyphen first! Unless proven otherwise, I’m convinced that using powershell command-line is somehow easier with the mouse.
I really think that the use of objects as a currency between executing processes is GOLD! In fact, I’ll spend a few spare cycles exploring the command set to understand the run-time benefits of powershell over cmd. But for bills-sake, make it intuitive!
Gates 0. Stallman 1.
November 30th, 2006 at 7:13 pm
I had an interesting debate over the merits of object piping versus string piping. I think the only thing that saves powershell is that it is dynamic and you don’t have to know what types of objects you are getting. This allows you to make use of those structured objects with duck typing. Otherwise you would only write scripts to interact with specific other scripts or commands.
However, many feel the question still remains as to the effectiveness of this technique over String handling. My response is that you can just convert all the Objects to strings if you want and then concat those together, and boom you’re back to *nix style piping. At least with this methodology you can take advantage of some pretty advanced features when you know they are there or fall back to *nix style when they aren’t.
December 2nd, 2006 at 4:36 pm
It’s great when Korn has his own wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Korn.
I also love the story about the argument between microsoft/MKS and Korn about how compatible MKS shell was with ksh88, or rather that it is not.
I dont’ feel there will/can be any common ground between microsoft and shell. The 2 by design are worlds apart. Bash is good but you can always download the OS version of KSH and do REAL shell programming.