Ivan Enderlin š¦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 šŗš¦š·š@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 yearāeven if they don't need toāis 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.
mt@Di4na @cstross @tshepang @Keltounet @hywan the idea that a stable UI is something āmagicalā is pretty bizarre.
Required changes in gesture or keystroke should be carefully minimized and the vast majority should be optional.
Backwards compatibility is THE most important feature of any software product upgrade, but somehow that seems to be a forgotten principle. Itās perhaps only a small part of why we have a sense that our devices are losing rather than gaining utility. But itās part of it.
@mtobis @cstross @tshepang @Keltounet @hywan ah yes, the most important part is to keep the UI that most of humanity cannot use.
Magical indeed.
@Di4na @cstross @tshepang @Keltounet @hywan
Nothing prevents a complete UI upgrade as long as the old one is still the default for existing users. But changing either the existing UI or any existing APIs for existing users is a betrayal. I donāt understand why this isnāt obvious.
@mtobis @cstross @tshepang @Keltounet @hywan and i don't understand how my point is not obvious either.
So maybe we should both realise our arguments are not as strong and evident as it looks.
@Di4na @cstross @tshepang @Keltounet @hywan
Yes perhaps I miss your point.
Mine is that i do fail to see why machines that are two orders of magnitude more powerful than thier predecessors canāt do exactly what their predecessors did in exactly the same way.
Maintaining software shouldnāt be a major expense. If it is, I think it is usually indicates a misdesign at some level of the stack. I can think of exceptions, but usually.
@mtobis @cstross @tshepang @Keltounet @hywan all of our stuff was deeply misdesigned because it was designed for a far different set of people and it only embedded that. Which means it all depends now on only having these people as customers. And once they become less than 10% of the user base, yes you break their stuff in order to serve the rest.
@Di4na @cstross @tshepang @Keltounet @hywan
I guess you're talking software services, while I'm talking local executables. But that's a key part of the enshittification process.
e.g. I just want to run the version of Photoshop I (thought I had) bought. I don't want Photoshop as a "service".
@Di4na @cstross @tshepang @Keltounet @hywan
An interesting example is that I had built an artistic style around pushing a feature of iPhoto to an extreme. Some might call the result buggy.
I did an OS upgrade and my iPhoto was "upgraded" with it. As a consequence the "bug" I had come to enjoy went away, and I stopped producing anything of the sort.
Maybe I was in a very small group. Maybe I was alone. But **I** didn't want the upgrade and should have been given the choice.
@mtobis @cstross @tshepang @Keltounet @hywan i mean if you want to keep using it, yes. The rest of the world move. Software does not live in a vacuum. If you stop updating it, it stops working.
@Di4na @cstross @tshepang @Keltounet @hywan why does it stop working? It doesnāt wear out like a car.
@mtobis @cstross @tshepang @Keltounet @hywan because it is not a car. It is the car, the road, the bridge and the pollution regulations. It depends on a ton of code that does not ship with it but with the computer that also change.
Way to talk to a graphic card, memory, way to understand mouse inpute and sounds, way to draw characters on the screen or how to explain which colour is which. Ways to open a file. Code from the 90s does not magically run even if you have the old version.
@Di4na @cstross @tshepang @Keltounet @hywan it is comtained in other code, which also doesnāt rust or wear out, to which the same principles should apply. Failing on backward compatibility destroys value, usually for no justifiable reason.
@Di4na @cstross @tshepang @Keltounet @hywan early MSwindows was scrupulous about supporting MS-DOS apps, wjich in fact basically saved me from manually retyping my doctoral thesis in LaTeX from the niche app I was using. There is no reason this canāt continue other than perverse motivations destroying value.
@tshepang @Di4na @cstross @Keltounet @hywan Someone closer than me to commercial coding should answer but Iād suggest that a satisfied user who can achieve their goals doesnāt need to buy more software.
So the business model needs to set up either subscription models or ways to break what already works and force replacement.
āplanned obsolescenceā
@mtobis @tshepang @cstross @Keltounet @hywan i literally am a commercial coder. It does not work as you say. I understand that it sounds like a good story, but it is not how it works.
@Di4na @tshepang @cstross @Keltounet @hywan
It's certainly a real motivation, whether conscious or not.
Like any long-time intensive user, I have lots of stories of things going away for no apparent reason, which was infrequent in the 80s and 90s and 00s. So how is this not a decline in utility in exchange for all your efforts?
@mtobis @tshepang @cstross @Keltounet @hywan and yet i can buy a super cheap pretty resilient and safe toaster for a lower price than in the 80s and that works as well rn.
So it seems... that you are comparing different products and wondering why one has different modalities than the other.
It is because they are not actually the new version of the older. They are a different one.
@Di4na @tshepang @cstross @Keltounet @hywan Not the experience of a Photoshop user or a Microsoft Office user to take a couple of hugely salient examples, no
@Di4na @tshepang @cstross @Keltounet @hywan and then there was Google Reader, a product that many people including myself loved, which simplyā¦ disappeared. Because user utility doesnāt matter and somebody at google wanted to foist some untested model of social media on us. Which failed spectacularly. But Reader didnāt come back!
So we retreated to Twitter. Which, well, all of us on here know aboutā¦
Ami Pro was an excellent lightweight desktop publishing/word processing tool. butā¦ etc. etc.