Ivan Enderlin 🦀The case for Nushell, https://www.jntrnr.com/case-for-nushell/.
Relevant article about shells, and how Nushell pushes the boundaries further. I highly recommend reading it.
Charlie Stross@hywan @Keltounet Question: "can the state of shells be improved enough to overcome the inertia of sticking to what you know?"
This is the wrong question. It presupposes zero cost of transition, while the cognitive workload of learning a new shell rises exponentially with age (hint: I'm nearly 60, shells are harder to adapt to than a new GUI). Stability and continuity are essential prerequisites to productivity!
Ollivier Robert 🇺🇦😷🌈@Keltounet @hywan Computing is not my job. It hasn't been my job for over two decades. Time spent learning a new shell or thinking about computers is time *wasted* from the non-compsci point of view.
Thing is, the question about the utility of switching to a new shell has embedded ideological assumptions that implicitly privilege computing over applications. To 99% of the world applications of computing are the priority; the machines and software are just an annoying drag on getting stuff done.
@Keltounet @hywan There's a deeper point: the past 70 years of computing have focussed on a spurious vision of progress that forgets to consider the utility of a stable platform. Operating systems in particular are driven by commercial goals (sell more software! Get more Linux desktops out there!) that are actively inimical to the needs of their users. Forcing users to learn a new way of working every year—even if they don't need to—is crazy. And it renders computers inaccessible to the elderly.
@Keltounet @hywan I watched my mother progressively (and completely) lose the ability to use her iMac during her final decade because Apple kept f*cking around with the Mac OS X user interface, the way Mail worked, the colour of the window maximize/minimize buttons, and stuff that probably looked trivial to a 30-something UI designer but was deeply disruptive to an 80 something with impaired memory. And by losing that access, she lost touch with friends (via email).
tshepang@cstross
I would agree many UI changes in all manner of tools seem to be change for its own sake (where improvements are not clear, or worse, where the UX feels worse), as if the decision makers need to feel productive
@Keltounet @hywan
I would agree many UI changes in all manner of tools seem to be change for its own sake (where improvements are not clear, or worse, where the UX feels worse), as if the decision makers need to feel productive
@Keltounet @hywan
@tshepang @Keltounet @hywan UI changes in corporate products seem to happen purely to justify the product manager's request for a pay rise at their annual review! And at Google, old products get killed ruthlessly to make way for new products because that's the only way a manager can earn promotion.
This shit is actively hostile to the users' interests, but it's ubiquitous.
I mean, Canonical think 5 years is "long term stable" for Ubuntu, which is bullshit: should be AT LEAST a decade.
Thomas Depierre@cstross @tshepang @Keltounet @hywan I mean, on the other hand, 10 years LTS is... really expensive if not impossible. Computers are not some magical thing frozen in time. Maintenance costs rise fast, and not linearly with time, especially with context change.
I totally agree with your point on the UX change ofc, but for example, in terms of shell, as he mentioned in the article... Nushell is not really meant to replace your use of shell. It is built to replace glue scripts. And yes. needed.
@Di4na @tshepang @Keltounet @hywan
"Maintenance costs rise fast"
... which is why IBM mainframes still happily run Series 360 assembly programs from the early 1960s, the hardware is all hot-swappable and fault tolerant, and the main backward compatability issue is finding folks who know what the bottom of the application stack is even supposed to do (the original designers all died of old age).
The inevitability of perpetual churn is a lie. It can be avoided.
@cstross @tshepang @Keltounet @hywan I mean yes, it costs so much to run stuff still on these machines that the estimated cost reduction from moving away from them and paying for the churn is regularly considered order of magnitude cheaper than to keep paying that cost. Ofc the cost of switching is high because it has accumulated over time.
I have seen the accountant doing the maths, I have been in these rooms. It can be avoided, totally. But the costs is rarely one anyone is ready to pay.
Michael Kohne@Di4na @cstross @tshepang @Keltounet @hywan I assure you, they are paying in dealing with the various forms of churn instead. It just comes out of a different budget.