why Unix?

[Jesse Phillips]

On Thu, 09 Apr 2009 10:52:02 +1000, Daniel Keep wrote:

> Christopher Wright wrote:
>> With Powershell, you need to be familiar with the tools for dealing
>> with System.Data.DataTable or whatever. Maybe it would only take ten
>> minutes. The most time it could save in that regard is an hour.
> 
> The syntax for these commands is so simple, you don't even really need
> to learn them.
> 
> It's stuff like "get-columns" and "sort-list".  I don't think I ever ran
> across a powershell command where I couldn't accurately guess it's
> purpose.  Most of the time, I even got the syntax first try without
> needing to check the help.
> 
> What's more, it's the SAME set of tools for EVERY kind of object.  If it
> helps, imagine if in UNIX you could treat any file as a folder of files
> containing the parsed contents (each of which may, themselves, be
> folders of files.)
> 
> You wouldn't need sed or awk for parsing any more because the
> environment has already done it for you.
> 
>> The cost of learning is not a significant factor here. You might have
>> plenty of other good arguments (and I offered some), but this isn't one
>> of them.
> 
> It took me a year or more to become fluent and comfortable with
> scripting in UNIX.  I don't think you CAN learn things like sed or grep
> straight away because you've got to learn the regex language first (and
> they're always bloody different in every different environment.)  You
> then have to learn how the program works, and which options are actually
> useful.  And then you need to practice with it.
> 
> When I first started using sed, I had to constantly check the man page
> because I forgot which options I wanted to use.  Same thing with grep (I
> only recently started remembering when I needed the -v switch, for
> example, and I've been using it for years!)
> 
> Powershell's learning curve is practically non-existent.  There are no
> domain-specific languages; just standard commands with regular, obvious
> names that all do one thing really well.
> 
> Within about an hour of first seeing powershell in action, I felt
> comfortable writing simple scripts to munge data.  An hour versus a
> year+ with UNIX; that's not something you can simply ignore.
> 
> If you're happy with UNIX, then that's fine.  But discounting the things
> powershell does well is just doing yourself a disservice.
> 
> What really saddens me is that, assuming powershell is better, UNIX will
> never match it; at least not for a very long time.  UNIX has so much
> history in its CLI, whereas Windows doesn't.  Microsoft can afford to
> "reboot" the Windows CLI and start from scratch; UNIX can't.
> 
> Then again, Microsoft could just flub the whole thing anyway.  :P
> 
>   -- Daniel

I'll probably agree powershell is better than bash/other Unix shells. But 
in truth, it would be easy to replace the shell with one that works like 
powershell, no one has created one and if they did it wouldn't take off.

I liked your note that Windows can completely redo the CLI because it 
hasn't been the heart, yet most of their issues have come from not being 
able to redo the Win32 API :) With having to deal with all the backward 
compatibility and security issues, their users experience has degraded.