why Unix?

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Wed, 08 Apr 2009 06:38:53 -0400, Yigal Chripun <yigal100 at gmail.com>  
wrote:

> 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.

My experience with WMI is that it is buggy and very slow, not to mention  
really complicated.  I would hate to rely on it for scripting.  On the  
other hand, having everything as a file allows me to use all existing file  
processing tools to deal with anything on a UNIX system.  The file API is  
simple and doesn't require me to look at an object spec to do simple tasks.

> Windows has a different design than Unix's "everything is a file" which  
> IMO is a stupid legacy design from the 70's.

The old "technology from the 70's" chestnut.  Your opinion varies from 90%  
of people who actually use scripts.  New technology for the sake of being  
new isn't better.

> 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.

It's not crap, just not as good.  It's a poor replacement for the  
"Everything is the same" design.  Having everything use the same API has  
huge advantages in modularity.  One of my hugest pet peeves with Windows  
is that it has several different APIs for I/O objects, and ony sockets  
support the select interface.  I have no idea what Windows devs were  
smoking when they decided not to allow select on any object.  Making  
efficient I/O driven apps that use more than just sockets is really  
difficult.

-Steve