why Unix?

[Yigal Chripun]

On 08/04/2009 02:48, Christopher Wright wrote:
> Yigal Chripun wrote:
>> ever heard of powershell? it is in fact a superior design for a shell
>> compared to most unix shells.
>
> I have tried it briefly. Too briefly to give a good analysis of it.
>
> The GUI is better than that of cmd.exe, but not anywhere near as good
> as, say, GNOME Terminal. (It's still fixed width, as I recall; just
> wider by default.)
>
> Another issue is integrating it with existing utilities.
>
>> also, have you ever heard of rush? http://rush.heroku.com/
>
> It's an interesting concept. I think I'll try it out. But it has nothing
> to do with GUIs for housing shells.

both options above are shells not terminals. in fact powershell just 
runs inside a cmd.exe window.
both shells are orders of magnitude better than unix standard shells and 
of course bat files. btw, windows admins use different tools than BAT 
files for scripting windows - based on VB/js up until XP. now the MS 
recommended way is powershell. windows as an infrastructure of WMI 
_objects_ (as opposed to UNIX files) that provide everything you need to 
manage windows with scripting.
Windows has a different design than Unix's "everything is a file" which 
IMO is a stupid legacy design from the 70's. therefore, trying to do the 
unix way on windows with BAT files is simply the wrong way. it doesn't 
work because it is not designed to work like that.
my take on all this, I'm not a huge fan of windows and it sure has its 
own problems, but this specific aspect is done much better than UNIX and 
all those comments about "windows doesn't support unix's "everything is 
a file" design and therefore it's crap" just show a lot of ignorance.

btw, if you want a different _terminal_ for windows, check out console2 
and also the next version of powershell (beta) has a new graphical 
terminal (iirc, written from scratch with C#)