Actually, this comparison is not correct. Windows and Unix have a different philosophy of kernel<->user level interaction. While Windows tries to add all functionality to the kernel, Unix does this on user level. Remember the KISS principle. So If you comfortable with Windows OS level API it's good for you, but for Unix world, it's not necessary to do something because we already have a different inter-process communication approach.
Pipe based interactions work properly only across CLI based applications, and even then the applications need to be explicitly written to accept and parse the data.
PowerShell or other Xerox inspired shells don't need kernel support to achieve their workflows.
Unix shells are quite good for their purpose. It's not a full-featured programming language. Can you explain what is "poor man's REPL"?
> Pipe based interactions work properly only across CLI based applications
Yes. If you want to find something in logs or looking at any other text data pipes is a good solution. In any other case(like binary data) it will be better to choose GRPC(or any other RPC). I never have seen GUI apps on servers, sorry.
> PowerShell or other Xerox inspired shells don't need kernel support to achieve their workflows.
Good for them :)
An approximation of it would be to have a shell that is a Jupyter netbook with access to the whole set of OS APIs, shared libraries and applications, with the ability to jump into the debugger at any given step of the pipeline, and redo the current step.
I bet you saw GUI apps on UNIX workstations, though.
Then again, maybe Steve Jobs was right after all.
https://www.usenix.org/blog/vault-steve-jobs-keynotes-1987-u...
https://www.cake.co/conversations/rZXhqtP/that-time-i-had-st...
Shell is a command-line interpreter with additional functionality like scripting. Why it should have fully functional REPL? Lisp/ST/etc are programming languages, they are uncomfortable for copying files, moving directories, calling curl or using tar.
> An approximation of it would be to have a shell that is a Jupyter netbook with access to the whole set of OS APIs, shared libraries and applications, with the ability to jump into the debugger at any given step of the pipeline, and redo the current step.
You can use python for this purpose. I don't understand why Unix shell should have all this functionality.
> I bet you saw GUI apps on UNIX workstations, though.
Yes, of course, I have GUI apps on my MacBook, but they don't use piping for inter-process communication because bi-directional pipes are not quite useful like an ordinary RPC.
Lisp is an interactive programming language. On can run functions like COPY-FILE, RENAME-FILE, ...
The Listener of the Symbolics Lisp Machine has commands which allow prompting of arguments, input menus, completion, object reuse, etc. It's also integrated in Lisp. For example you can list a directory using a command and then use the pathname objects in calls to Lisp functions. One can also use the output of Lisp functions as input to commands. It's an interesting mix of a command interpreter and a Lisp REPL.
I get so utterly sick of stupid arguments where people compare their tools and then proceed to makes claims that one is objectively better than another when it’s clearly just a matter of personal taste
dlcall
> Or interact with running applications using the OS APIs like Powershell allows with WMI, COM, OLE Automation and .NET?
Depends what you need. You can use nc -U /var/run/socket or pipes with expect. If you have root permissions you can use gdb scripting/ebpf to communicate with user-space/kernel-space data of your application.
> Yes, there is DBUS, but isn't really integrated across the whole stack.
DBUS is a bus for desktops/mobile. I never saw that someone use it for server applications. The main idea(after KISS) of the Linux shell is that if you can't write something in awk it will be better to use python. Actually, in the Linux world, GRPC/REST is more common than OS-level API.