Honestly? Powershell is pretty cool, though it feels a little strange to admit that. It has it's own very powerful syntax and virtually all of the common Bash commands are now aliased by default, so it's pretty smooth transition for the basic stuff.
Where Arcan cannily (IMHO) differs from Powershell is it acknowledges the transition from existing toolchains will be organic instead of demanding wholesale operational changes to a different processing model. So it splits the data and metadata processing pipeline, exposes it at key points to the developers using Arcan, and lets an emulation layer cover legacy use cases, while enabling Arcan developers to create much richer data representations underneath the covers that can be tapped if desired by users via Lua manipulating the many different Arcan components (I think). This opens up hybrid GUI/TUI/other-interface best-of-breed/mixed-mode options that are unreasonably challenging to implement (especially with sync logic) with current UI stacks.
I like this approach more than Powershell's, but it remains to be seen how Arcan handles the guidance of the data and metadata ontology and resultant taxonomy; it is a much deeper problem space than just defining a default namespace, a way to modularly plug into it with extensions, then standing back and letting developers have at it. The way Powershell handled it, introspection and discoverability are out of band instead of a batteries included experience, and module management is still split out of band between Nuget, PrivateGallery, custom solutions, hand-curated Git+Jenkins lash-ups, etc.
For my small-scale, personal projects like for my family's intranet, the lack of an opinionated default for at-scale management of these issues is not a problem. But at my clients with dozens, hundreds and even thousands of developers, it presents software engineering management challenges. Solvable, just a developer experience hygiene factor I'd rather not deal with because solving it adds zero business value, it's just the cost of doing business.
The fabric under attack was the bastard display server protocol itself and not the parts that tie in with the strong points of Powershell, i.e. shell UI design or data exchange format specifics.
This story was continued in a post from yesterday that fizzled, https://arcan-fe.com/2021/04/12/introducing-pipeworld/#pipel...
The experience could be replicated in UNIX shells, but noone sems to care to actually go down that path.
I could see a whole library of such wrappers being built for common executables (and new popular OSS CLI tools could provide their own wrapper along with the tool).
Oh! Wait! This is what tools like cut, jq, grep, awk, and sed to.
And they won't tie you to a certain object model.
Yes! Except, you have to use them to write one-shot parsers that are specific to both what you're piping from and what you're piping to! For n commands you may want to arbitrarily mix, that's n² parsers to write.
> And they won't tie you to a certain object model.
From the point of view of a system user, tying to a certain object model is a feature. It facilitates commands interacting well with no parsers in between. But even if you don't have a common object model, just wrapping the commands to produce structured output can already be helpful, because the parsers you'll be writing to glue commands will operate on structured, higher-level concepts. It's easier to map between two different representations of what a "file" or "process" is, than it is to manually dig them out of an unstructured text stream.
To use a stupid example, assuming hypothetical "kill-and-announce" that echoes a process name and sends a SIGKILL to its PID:
ps aux | awk '{ ...extract columns... }' | sed 'rename columns' | xargs kill-and-announce ...
wrapped-ps | wrapped-kill-and-announce
wrapped-ps | select Target={id:$_.PID, name:$_.name} | wrapped-kill-and-announcePersonally, I’m discovering more and more that CL’s REPL in SLIME is my preferred shell in part because the CL ecosystem has a rich array of operations on a small number of data-types (without forcing everything into binary streams), but also the ability to define ad-hoc datatypes as needed and a powerful system for manipulating them and integrating the custom data types into existing protocols.
Also, the claim that you need n^2 encoder/decoders isn’t actually true: conventions around data formats can reduce it to O(n) in the number of conventions.
Myself I know I'm stuck here. I've been thinking in circles for a while. At the moment, I'm leaning towards rich type system and structured data, but I'm not sure if it can be made fully convenient for the shell.
Do you know if anyone attempted to summarize this debate and distill some conclusions, or reframe it in a way that would allow to make progress?
> I’m discovering more and more that CL’s REPL in SLIME is my preferred shell
In terms of command line or scripting? SLIME is awesome, particularly with its interactive Inspector :). And I wrote my fair share of "scripts" as CL functions. But I can't seem to get used to using the REPL as a shell; I feel something is missing. Most likely convenience functions (that I didn't bother to write for myself yet).
That whole paragraph you wrote applies to another Lisp system, though: Emacs. In recent years, I've been leaning on it more and more for day-to-day operations. For instance, I rarely use shell for file operations - I mostly stick to dired. I end up scripting common operations straight in Emacs Lisp, and bind them to ad-hoc UIs (using the Hydra package). And of course utilize well-known packages like Magit (for Git). This recent experience makes me think that we could pull more common shell interactions and turn them from 1D to 2D interface. And I keep dreaming about merging it with PowerShell, in a way that allows Emacs to ingest and manipulate .NET objects nicely, while at the same time exposing its internals to PowerShell.
> Also, the claim that you need n^2 encoder/decoders isn’t actually true: conventions around data formats can reduce it to O(n) in the number of conventions.
I think this assumes conversions are lossless, which isn't the case in UNIX piping. When you invoke "tools like cut, jq, grep, awk, and sed", it's almost always to filter out most of the text in the pipeline.
OTOH, PS 7.0 added ForEach -Parallel
Can you tell me more? So I know what to expect when I hit such issue myself.
> The work around is to write a wrapper in a compiled language and use PowerShell to invoke the wrapper...
Wonder if you need to really break out of PowerShell for this.
Recently when doing some scripting at work, I ended up writing .NET code straight in the script. It looks like this:
$someCSharp = @"
using System;
//...
public class Foo : Bar {
public override object Baz(Quux arg) {
//...
}
}
"@
Add-Type $someCSharp -ReferencedAssemblies C:\Path\To\Some\dependency-I-need.dll
I suppose using a proper .NET development environment for this would be more kosher; I arrived at the solution described above because my needs were simple, like binding .NET regex engine to SQLite (to get REGEXP operator in queries), or convincing Invoke-RestMethod to stop checking certificate validity.
Still, I love the capability, the fact that I can just drop into C# in the middle of the script. It's one of those things that make me think of Lisp machines and Common Lisp the experience of being able to deeply interact with your environment, and the joy of writing "scripts" that are automatically AOT-compiled (like with SBCL implementation of Common Lisp).