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).
Jyrgen N@cstross @Keltounet It was disheartening to see recently how my parents, both mid-80s, struggled when they went from Windows 10 to 11 with a new computer. My mother is more flexible, but I learned my father (whose main uses are email and editing amnesty international letters) does *everything* by rote with nearly no conceptual understanding, and the — in my eyes small — changes from Windows 10 to 11 were absolutely debilitating for him.
@cstross @Keltounet Trying to help him through this change was one of the hardest things I have done for years. At some point we were both angry at each other and I tried to just break it off to just get out of that situation, but he persevered, and then we actually got him a little further until he said, I think I can handle this on my own now. And I am sure doing that actually on his own again later was still really hard for him.
John McChesney-Young@jyrgenn @cstross @Keltounet Some years ago I spent many hours trying to help a professor with early Alzheimer's cope with a campus-mandated update from Windows XP to 7 and it was not easy.
@jmccyoung @cstross @Keltounet I can imagine that.
Not the case with my father, though. He is not mentally impaired at all, but he has never been a very technical person, and learning new things has indeed become more difficult with age. Interestingly my mother, who has never been a technical person at all, finds it myself easier working her way through these things. But with her, too, I can hardly bear watching how she does things.
Not the case with my father, though. He is not mentally impaired at all, but he has never been a very technical person, and learning new things has indeed become more difficult with age. Interestingly my mother, who has never been a technical person at all, finds it myself easier working her way through these things. But with her, too, I can hardly bear watching how she does things.
Nire Bryce@jyrgenn @jmccyoung @cstross @Keltounet
[edit: oops, I must have applied the 'not' to two clauses and not just the one, apologies! I'm leaving this here to not make the replies look weird, but can remove if you want]
fwiw, all of these have a *time cost*, and most people cannot dedicate a hobby worth of time for the weeks it takes just to get their functionality back
jubilee@NireBryce @jyrgenn @jmccyoung @cstross @Keltounet yeah, but this entire conversation opened up with Charlie Stross scoffing about how technocapital looks down on and flattens everything under its gaze because it cannot help but See Like A State, and now people are casually eliding the difference between the accessibility requirements of the GUI and command-line shells as if they're the same thing.
so are we supposed to be discussing this with nuance or are we moving on to "new UX is bad therefore let's make everyone work to death with pickaxes and shovels"? because the last time I heeded people on "just leave old people alone, they can't learn new things" my grandmother never learned my proper name before she died. or do we want to perhaps consider that perhaps someone's hobby project isn't a sinister plot to uninstall bash from your computer?
@jubilee
(I read a second "not" into the statement I was replying to, also. oops)
(I read a second "not" into the statement I was replying to, also. oops)
@NireBryce ( I honestly don't think anything you said was wrong, the thread had just reached critical "how did we get here?" levels even for my ADHD. )
@jubilee yeah