Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's new CLI
An anonymous reader writes "Months ago a story ran regarding a job advert at Microsoft for a developer role to lead the work on a new generation of command line interface.
It has now been disclosed at the PDC and its name is MSH (Microsoft SHell), codenamed MONAD.
Here is the best description so far."
named GONAD ?
Ranks right along SHT as a crappy acronym. The first thing I would think of when seeing MSH is MicroSoft Hell, not Microsoft Shell...
Daniel
Carpe Diem
But hey, it's original if there's the "Micrsoft" brand name stuck somewhere in there, right?
The problem is that .msh files will be exectuted by default from the mail reader, the web browser, and the media player. Virus writers will be the first people adopt the scripts, and be the only ones to use them because Microsoft won't advertise, support, document, or otherwise promote the technology. As a result, administrators will have to find a way to turn of .msh scripting and nobody will be able to use it anyway.
Take that, dirty Linux hippies! Take that, Thieving Macintosh Republicans!
Seriously, this is a wonderful thing. The shell has been one of the most lacking areas under Windows. I don't know how many times I've dropped into Cygwin or, before that, wasted time writing little C apps just to do basic bulk renaming operations and the likes.
Any word on whether they'll standardize the environment across all Windows products, or is this likely to be a server product only? Will this be the standard shell replacement, or will we now have command.com, cmd.exe and newthing.exe all living in parallel? I like choices, but Windows apps' ad hoc use of largeley-incompatible command.com and cmd.exe is already a source of pain.
One last thing: anything can be mapped to a drive, and drives don't just have to be letters.
Reminds me of this 15 year old Acorn technology which has always allowed one to develop its own filer modules to access whichever file or device type as if it were a directory.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Well they're close... just one letter away from "Gonad"...
=Smidge=
I saw MSH and immediatly thought MS Hell, not MS Shell.
Perhaps it should be MSSH?
And I'm not bashing either.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
...that's the time before we get the first MSH viruses.
Am I being cynical when I think this just looks like VB for Consoles?
Ceci n'est pas une signature
I'd give up my middle nut for a shell like that!
Along with MONAD, Microsoft is also developing MENIS, the Microsoft Enhanced Networking Interface Solution. MENIS and MONAD products will be tightly integrated.
I guess Microsoft works is now going to be called "Microsoft - use a type writer" and they'll rename their Mac areas as "firing stations".
Now if only the RIAA would take the same idea and rename their lawsuits "Useless wastes of time".
--- [Insert intresting Sig here]
Isn't Microsoft allowed to change event its proprietary products?
so stop bitching
hmmm new feature + crappy os = worthless piece of crap that is completely unusable and is also overpriced for your convience
p>The only thing worse than a troll is a troll without wit.
Apple will surley make something for 10.4, called iSHELL, complete with anti-alaised fonts, tabbed shells, alpha blending, PRESS F9 and see all your shells at once, and of course support for throbbing Aqua buttons.
Screenshot of My G5 desktop!
From the comments after the linked article :-
Finally a real Next Gen command shell... And one that looks to put the others to shame.
Nice leep frog MS...
Can anyone who knows more about these things than I explain exactly how this puts the various Unix shells to shame?
Yet another feature ....
The only thing that I would find revelant is that MS is definitly thinking in terms of "they have neat shells in Linux, how can we have something that stands the comparison ?". After Apple including KHTML and GNU parts in its operating system, it seems that Free Software are really getting the lead in software industry.
It's interesting how the story changes. Ballmer would refer to GNU/Linux(especially elements like the use of the shell) as 1980's technology. Now there are making their own.
Maybe users will be able to help themself a little bit...
killall DRM && killall clippy && killall klez
-t
http://unmoldable.com W:"No one of consequence" I:"I must know" W:"Get used to disappointment"
From the article:
.NET objects!
.NET objects? This seems rather like using a baseball bat to swat a fly...
One last thing: anything can be mapped to a drive, and drives don't just have to be letters. (Ok, I lied - that was 2) The example I was shown was that the registry was mapped to a drive, and you could navigate it like any other drive, with the results being returned from the commandlet as
The user has been able to map a filesystem to a folder rather than a drive letter since at least Windows 2000, and I think it was possible even under NT4. Nothing new there.
The registry (along with many other things) can be mapped as part of the filesystem fairly easily, as demonstrated by this 264kB DLL file.
And as for returning search results as
End of lesson. You may press the button.
MSH - doesn't it mean MicroSoft Hell?
[grammarnazi]
you forgot the "'s" in the middle
[/grammernazi]
This is not informative at all. This guy just copied an article about the Common Language Infrastructure, but the CLI referred to in the article is about a Command Line Interface. Moderate the parent down please.
--
The world is divided in two categories:
those with a loaded gun and those who dig. You dig.
MicrosOft SHell More pronounceable than MSH...
Whats with these names lately? It seems like MS is dropping u's left and right. First the drop the u out of WinFX and now MSH.
In Republican America phones tap you.
According to this page, it means "ultimate, indivisible unit". Interesting. :)
Z
2+2=5 for extremely large values of 2
Most M$ admins I know (and they started out as *nix admins) use perl for their scripting on both O/S's.
Will be interesting to see how the GUI generation get on with a proper scritping language.
C:\> winword.exe
.___
// \
||@@|
|| ||
|\_||
\__/
_||_
It looks like you're trying to run a program. Would you like me to start WINWORD.EXE? [Y/N]
With something called DOS..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
MSH (Microsoft SHell),
Did anyone else read this as Microsoft's Hell?
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
The first post pointing the rhyme out is moderated as Redundant, and the second is Funny? WTF??
http://www.abercrombiegroup.co.uk/~noel/research/m onads.html
Is already a mathematical term
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Monad.html
and who knows what else, surprised MS didn't choose another word they could Copyright, and TradeMark
'Monads' are part of Leibnitz's philosophy, which Voltaire famously satirised in Candide with the figure of Dr. Pangloss, who resolutely maintained that we live in 'this, the best of all possible worlds' despite a succession of disasters that would convince any sane man that he was wrong.
How very suitable for a Microsoft product.
Ne mæg werig mod wyrde wiðstondan, ne se hreo hyge helpe gefremman.
It's only a matter of time until some thoughtful person writes enough scripts to make MSH operate like Bash.
-- dK
Since query results are .Net objects, maybe we can build a GNU shell like this based on Mono. Lessee, what to call it... MONAD... GNU... GONAD!
GONAD will be pure innovation. What's that you say? Linux has had a powerful programmable shell with consistent behavior for over ten years? Oh MAN, I thought we had something NEW here.
include $sig;
1;
Why not simply use bash under Cygwin to get all the functionality of a decent shell?
Who need's another shell?
Or maybe MS could natively support unix bash under Windows.
Or maybe looks more like MS has a nice a vaporware to prevent you switching to whatever else you would like (be it OSX or linux or bsd or whatever non ms)
"a real, proven scripting language like Python"
Bahahahahhahaha
You made my morning, Thanks!
For a long time, the windows command line was a joke. It was basically DOS-in-a-box, capable of running programs, and that was about it. Sure, you had net.exe and a few tools borrowed from the unix world.
Recently, Microsoft has actually begun to produce command line tools for system operations, controlling your services, networks, policies, and registry from the command prompt. But they still have a long way to go, these features are poorly documented (the policy editor's help lists a subset of all the policies you can edit with it. The KB article on it basically is a copy-paste of the help message, with explanations of the policynames provided), typically cryptic, and still don't provide the full set of features.
They may have come a long way, but they have a long way to go. And remember, this is just playing catchup.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Microsoft is the only major OS that doesn't have a standard *nix style shell. The popularity of cygwin for Windows developers shows that there's significant demand for it. Imagine how much nicer it would be if instead of trying to "leep frog"[sic] the Unix shell they just adopted cygwin.
msh exploits the transparency and "reflection" abilities of the object oriented features of the OS.
Read down the article for details on how they can now do things like mount the registry as a drive and walk it like a filesystem. Yegads!
bash (or some sh-variant) would have to be adapted to know specific things about linux to compete at that feature level, but it would become non-portable.
This is what the new sysfs interface is supposed to help with. Still, bash isn't object oriented (yet). The closest thing would be like perlsh.
I think people don't give MS enough credit for where they stand even today, frankly.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
Ximian will soon announce a syntax-compatible shell, codenamed DeezNuts.
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
I would have thought MSH == MicroSoft Hell
SCO still have developers?
Wanted: DOS expert.
Microsoft is developing a new operating system code named CLI. The release name of the project is expected to be "DOS NT".
We give extra consideration to programmers of command line operating systems. SUNOS, HPUX, BSD, AIX programmers especially welcome Linux programmers best keep that experience to themselves.
Please apply at jobs.microsoft.com if you feel that you qualify.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
MYNAD ?
WTF?
Although it's easy to make the gonad jokes, the concept of monads have a long history in metaphysics dating back to the greeks. Monads were central to the philosophy of Liebniz, the co-discoverer of calculus.
I really thought that the first post was sarcarstic, until I read the hordes of "Me Too" replies that followed. Call me crazy, but the last thing I want is Clippy monitoring my typing in tcsh.
Cool! Now Mac users are Republicans by default. I didn't know that.
I cut my teeth at the DOS prompt. As a *nix user for the past five years, I now understand the power of scripting that can't be accomplished in a GUI, and isn't possible in a
The cure for cancer is coming: Reovirus
GONAD object network architecture doohicky.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
That shoulds like a much better name.
I don't think a ritual sacrifice counts as lending.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Nice to see that Microsoft is continuing the stupid naming scheme they started back in the old days with dosshell. Now they will have Microsofts-Hell also.
Your TRS80 wasn't multitasking. BASIC could only control itself, not other programs. Shell languages allow you to kick off , control and kill
other processes either on the command line or in a script program. And if you have to have the usefulness of that explained to you
then I suggest you stick with your Tandy.
well it is easy to see who microsoft is trying
to entice. no matter what you can't polish a
turd. I don't care how unixey microsoft makes
windows I still will not buy it or use it. I
have no reason to use it at all. especially
pay microsoft os fee's.
Does anyone remember Microsoft Shell from the dos (4.x??) and on days?
A really clunky graphical DOS application which let you copy files and rename them or something? It ran in like 320x200 EGA.
Can't wait till they bring that back!
Easy guys, I put my pants on one leg at a time. The difference is after I put on my pants I make gold records!
Why does it seem ever since they brought out WINNT 3.5, they have been trying to sneak their way into UNIX style architectures. win9x crapped out so they needed a better structured kernel with proper permission and process control. They ever sneaked in the BSD TCPIP stack.
.NET to compete with J2EE, but really the COM and other RPC stuff in Windows are descended from Sun's RPC. Active Directory was brought in from other LDAP efforts, and using Microsoft's monopoly has been trampling other directory services like iPlanet and Novell AD.
Brought out
Funny now they're looking into CLI which will gradually seem more like bash since most of their CLI designers would be well-acquainted with UNIX, and their users too. As Microsoft will follow UNIX in innovation, the UNIX/Linux/BSD community will get greater credibility. Microsoft is undermining itself by not innovating fast enough.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
I appreciate that the article doesn't really tell us anything but the features that Mr Nadal is so `wowed' by are all currently available on the computer I have.
Reminds me of the saying ``Those who do not understand UNIX are doomed to reinvent it, poorly''.
So one guy wrote Microsoft's Hell (as it will surely be called)? Oh well, Tim Paterson wrote DOS on his own and look how good that was ;-)
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
you weasle! you stole that joke (where it was better executed even) from the discussion board below TFA!
Please put your flame thrower away. I am not saying that my trash-80 was better suited to doing what current shells can do. All I am saying is that the idea of using scripting language commands on a command line is not a big deal, since I used to be able to do it 24 years ago, and current shells can do something like it now.
My, some people are touchy when you call their baby ugly.
"I walked up to the booth asking if unix-like file aliases would be in the new shell, and was given a demo by the team that had my mind racing."
Microsoft is just now adding a powerful shell (I don't think MS-DOS counts as powerful, does it?) and I assume symbolic links by the above quote.
This stuff was around long before Microsoft. And what pisses me off is that these assholes will pass this off as innovation, so will the press, and so will the sheep.
-kidlinux.
"And then there's Apple. They make fun stuff. The are not afraid to invent, and they have the money to launch stuff that the OpenSource movement cannot. I don't quite know where to place them compared to OpenSource and MS."
/., IBM, School
:D
Heres a nice 'placement' scale, so you have a good reference point:
{cool} - Open Source, Girls, Music, SciFi, etc.
{OK} -
{ghey} - Apple, People who use Apple, etc.
{uhg} - MS, Cops, DMV
{suck} - SCO, White supremecits, GNAA, etc.
Hope that helps!
I have to say that passing objects instead of streams of untyped bytes is neat. They may have screwed up the implementation, but having typed data passing in and out of command line tools would be awesome. Consider how cool it'd be if you had command line tools that spit out things like image, HTML, and music objects, etc. The shell could be smart enough to do smart things with the data; you could do a lot more on the normal command line, especially with a framebuffer. Also, apps could do input validation through type checking.
"Sit still, lest I remove but one of your hearts."
I don't know why more people don't actively pursue a modern language for the shell interface. sh script syntax is tortorous. So much easier and maintainable to write perl scripts. So why not use perl from the command line??
psh never really seemed to take off but it let you basically enter a perl debugging session but execute shell commands also. This would basically trump anything msh could muster and also provide the entire universe of CPAN to the shell.
sh is right up there with Makefiles for unix utilities that basically suck but are too entrenched to replace.
MS gave them nothing, shithead - that was just a reckless, unsupported rumor posted on /. because we all KNOW M$ is behind everything evil in the world.
9 7.html
http://marketwatch-cnet.com.com/2110-7344_3-50939
c:\spot
c:\spot\run
run|spot>>run
Hardly.
I've actually switched away from Linux (Mandrake specifically). I've been using various distributions since '97. Back then, if you were using Windows it was either 9x or NT (discounting the few still using 3.x... *shudder*).
Both were unstable, buggy pieces of crap, and Linux, even with it's steeper learning curve and arcane configs was a far preferable alternative.
Time has passed, however, and while Windows has improved almost beyond measure, Linux's improvements, in the areas that I care about, have been rather more incremental. Don't get me wrong, I still think that Linux-based systems are very good, but right now, XP Pro has the edge over them, for me at least (your mileage will of course vary), and to the extent that I spent cold, hard cash buying a copy.
What drove me away from Windows, essentially, was the instability and a number of UI niggles. 2k and XP have fixed stability - perhaps not for servers, but I'm talking about my desktop, not a server. Most of the UI niggles have also gone or can be configured away. I have no reason to spend the time and effort getting Linux setup and configured, and working around things like Office format docs (yes, Star/OpenOffice can handle most, but until it's 100% perfect, I can't use it at work for documents that I have to edit), and the other little things that make using it day to day less easy than using Windows. (Again, YMMV - but I can speak only for myself)
Maybe some Linux company will pull out something special between now and then, and tempt me back, but until that happens, I'm as happy running XP Pro as I ever was running Linux.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Monads are also a branch of category theory that are adopted by languages like Haskell (the prime developer of which works for Microsoft Research). By obeying a certain set of basic principles, programs structured with monads achieve high degrees of interoperability and consistency, while safely encapsulating data and keeping it from being destroyed by unwanted side effects.
Sure that's an apropos name for a Microsoft product?
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
There goes my 140K cmd.exe shell program. This is truly Microsofts-Hell.
-- TT
TT
So, instead of the default $ prompt, we'll get M$. Hope you can change that environment variable... I hope at least, it won't be an ascii representation of B.G..
So I still use bash, despite all it's deficiencies.
It would be nice for a next generation shell to look more like Python, IMHO.
But, has anyone been brave enough to spend 100% of their command line time in python instead of /bin/sh? Some of the syntax needed to get hold of files and doing grep inside python is still verbose compared to sh.
The idea of a super pipe with more powerful communications between seems intriguing, something using say XML-RPC between the parts instead of just a byte stream.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Is this a Halloween story?
of course, their ksh wasn't truly a standard since they couldn't get certain features to work properly. (And I still don't know if they ever got the specs on their quoting rules.)
And there's the famous argument they had with David Korn over whether or not they made the standard or not.
I think this is what amazes me about this. Why are they reinventing the wheel?
This is progress?
I don't know the TRS80 BASIC too well, but if you want the above statement translated to BASIC, it would probably go something like:..and, quite frankly, I don't think that would work on your TRS80.
Workbench: ...
TCP:
dh0:
Hm, where have I seen this before?
Nice. Give the AC props, mods.
Why does M$ spend billions in research if they are just going to copy what linux has?
Shit bill, i coulda told ya that for free!
Help! I've fallen in a karma hole and I can't get up!
Perhaps it is time I change my /. id. Those MS guys just can't let good thing remain good, can they?!
The law of excluded middle : Either I'm foo or I'm foobar
I actually get about 10-15 e-mails a day promising me MONAD. I believe it's a topical cream of some sort.
You mean something like this?
>> so, when will we see GNU's version named GONAD ?
I am currently working on a KONAD version for a well known desktop manager
So what you're saying is that the TRS80 accepted multiple commands on one line, just like today's shells?
And why exactly is that a bad thing?
My, some people are touchy when you call their baby ugly.
And, my, are some people touchy when they get feedback
"DUDE! MSH ROXORS! It's got for loops and, get this: COMMANDLETS! and and.. you can map things as drives! NO WAY! d000dz0rs! and it lets us use unix-style flags instead of the lame slash flags.. no way mang! i can finally show up at my friend's hax0r meetings and get mad g33k points.. aw yeah.. i'm gonna script-DOS the shiznit outta some lunix site.. watch out lam3rs!"
I suggest they use the proven brand-recognition of their most well known text-mode application, and call it the Blue Shell Of Death (BSOD). :-)
MT.
-MT.
Can someone please explain to me why that comment was modded as 'troll'?
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
Please Slashdot, you are overdoing the pranks today. First "Google Considers ...", now this. You gave this prank away with the tearfully funny acronyms: MSH, MONAD. Not to mention the absurdity of the whole Microsoft-writes-a-CLI concept. I still have nightmares about DOS. Maybe I'll read the article when I finish laughing, or when I finish crying.
~==>RocketSHE
"Those who do not understand UNIX are doomed to reinvent it, poorly."
Sounds like an improvement over the previous CLI, codenamed "NoNad" (aka CMD.EXE).
dude.. that's pretty funny. You're right of course.
Cool! Now Mac users are Republicans by default. I didn't know that. :)
So Al Gore has switched?
that's ok. I suspect anyone with an IQ above room tempeture (in Celsius) is already calling the original this.
I went to the PDC and talked with the group doing this feature. There are two caveats:
.exe will not spit its output out in the CLI, but will open a DOS window instead. Engineers indicated that there aren't firm plans to support this yet.
1) The Longhorn Command Shell does not yet support console applications. In other words, launching a console
2) The CLI has no acceptable means of text editing within the CLI itself. So, no VI, Emacs, or even EDIT.EXE. Editing must be done via external editor.
I thought 'NONADS' would be more descriptive.
The more microsoft morphs to become like linux, the less people will be inclined to throw away their money when they can get better functionality for free.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
The blurb is wrong is saying MSH stands for Microsoft SHell.
The correct name is MicrosoftS Hell.
Well if it is so nice as assuming it to have defeated linux command line feature, Open Source can always create a new project and 'copy' it. Due to the different, number, skills of developers working on the new project, hehehe, Linux will end up still winning. Of course its free, cross-platforms, etc.
Pronounced "moosh".
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
When one of their marketing drones was trying to tell everyone that DOS is dead and you don't really need the CLI anymore, even though Win2K could boot into a CLI recovery mode.
I suppose they've made a concession to all the command line commandos with MSH. Good news for all of us sysadmins running Microsoft not by choice. Then again, there's been decent alternatives since NT (thank you ActivePerl!).
--
hecubas
Hecubas
- Updating configuration files on multiple hosts
- Renaming a sequence of files
- Finding files that contain certain data values and manipulating those files
- Automating installation
To do those things does NOT requireMS needs to look beyond what a program does, and into what a sys admin does. Any code monkey can write a small code programs. What is needed is a good way to put small building blocks together. MS already has pipes, now how about:
- Named pipes so programs can easily communicate. Named pipes are part of the file system, so no extra coding is needed, just open a file for input or output. If you want to get clever, make them so that
.net objects can be passed through them.
- The ability to get input from the person running the script and stash it into an environment variable. Give me a standard way of doing this.
- Starting a new command that creates a new process, instead of running in the current one. I hate running
.cmd files that change the current directory.
Unix is what it is because it is NOT monolithic. There are a variety of tools out there to allow the admins to select the ones they want, with all of their associated blemishes, and get the job done. The biggest benefit of UNIX is there is literlly thousands of ways to do things, and more importantly, thousands of simple ways.Give us the KISS shell, and you might actually convert me.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Are you trying to tell me you like the syntax of Makefiles??
Well, there is already zoidberg
I'll admit it. I have been a long term supporter of Microsoft products. In particular, I insist on using Windows XP for a lot of things my developers would rather use Linux. Some of this can't be helped, since we produce consumer products for Windows. But on the datacetner side, it's a judgement call.
.NET thing is actually built around a core of very good ideas that, when fully realized, make development for Windows quite a different experience than anything else that has come before. This is a logical extension of that.
:(
But don't get me wrong, our big money maker stuff runs on Linux. And always will, I imagine. The power of Linux on the server side is so clear. And the new Kernel, when it's ready, looks like it'll solve the last of the bottleneck issues we've suffered under for so long.
I've adopted the idea that you pick the right tool for the right job. And I've always felt that Linux was awful at being approachable without being a dedicated Linux hacker (in the early days). Then as time went by it becamse more and more accessable. Heck, we even have Lindows now.
What Microsoft didn't expect is that this would ever really happen. But with Linux becoming more and more friendly, it's inherent power is undeinable.
So they are reacting. This new command line is simply a way of building up the server potential of... well... their servers. The whole
The fact is, competition works. Linux is driving Microsoft to actually innovate again! And I imagine that if Windows has a command line that Linux users will be envious of, they will respond in kind.
Patents, of course, will still be the horrible sticky point in all this.
David Whatley
Why does MS insist on reinventing the wheel?
You'd think they'd have more success with this if they made it compatibile with sh(1). Even sh(1) isn't the right metaphor for the Windows environment, adding whatever syntactical extensions or new commands that satisfy the Windows environment shouldn't be too hard.
By providing a sh(1) compatible shell, they could much more easily coopt UNIX users, which I think is what they want to begin with.
The real problem is that we have gone beyond the 8.3 file nameing constriction, yet MS comes out with a new extension still based on 8.3
Come on, let's get over it.
MSH -> MSShell
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
The term 'monad' pertains specifically to Leibnitz's metaphysics, which maintains that there is no physical world but only monads, atomic mini-minds which are pre-programmed with all the sense perceptions they will ever experience. Yes, rationalism is silly.
How do you know this? After the Word and Outlook fiascos and with Microsoft's increased focus on security, it seems unlikely that MS would make such a mistake again.
As much as I dislike Microsoft and their products, I don't think they'd be so foolish as to let something like a web browser execute shell scripts without restrictions.
Probably not. But do I think their hands are tied by MS's overriding concern: lock in users, lock out competitors, and leverage the monopoly. This is usually antithetical to doing the job the best or most innovative way.
The Open Source community does not have this limitation, so strives to do the best/coolest thing. That's how the Internet was invented and grew.
I hear people making jokes about MSH virus and 'going back to DOS', but wake up!
Consider the following bits of information:
Now, the introduction of a good (decent) CLI sounds more like another blow to OSS/FS OSes.
At the same time, don't be deluded into thinking that MS will make MS SHell Unix shell-compatible. They won't, because their basic business strategy is vendor lock-in (as is with any vendor, but they have no business reason not to and they are unstoppable). The only exception is if they come back later as the saviour of UNIX from Linux 'intellecutal property thieves' when the SCO thing is over.
I am not a pro-MS person, but that does not mean that I can just lie and hope it will become the truth. The future is indeed GRIM.
"What if, What if, What if..."
That's all I've been hearing since Windows 3.0 from Windows zealots, and nothing has changed--always holding their breath for the next release which will finally hold all the innovations (This time for sure! Hey Ballmer, watch me pull a longhorn out of my hat...presto!)
Microsoft fans like yourself are all about promises, and those promises are NEVER kept. So Microsoft is only NOW focusing on the biggest deficiency windows NT has...the shell. So what? They should have done this YEARS ago. I have yet to work in an NT development house where UNIX-like tools were not installed by default on every developer's machine. Microsoft has come way late to the party--the NT command-line is a weak, powerless throwback to the days of MS-DOS.
So "what if"? Microsoft's track record is terrible. As ever, I'll believe it when I see it. Microsoft has to PROVE themselves--I will not accept their, or your opinion that "this time for SURE it will be different and better!" Until then, criticism of Microsoft is justified.
Voltaire's criticism and satire of Leibniz was centered around "the best of all possible worlds" premise. It had very little, if anything, to do with Libnitz's monads.
Monads were, essentially, philosiphical atoms or molecules, albiet in a very metaphysical sense.
=Shreak
- a new MS Shell..... integrated with .net and the what ever you call it standard (to be) GUI package .net ) ------ you have the three primary UIs together and with them you you can create an autocoding environment. add to that voice to text translation .....
/. regarding the article..... there is an enormus depth of blind ignorance regarding what MS is up to.
so you take the sum of programming concepts and datatypes and boil them down into a non-conflicting package (Programming issues). In this you also create a GUI system to provide standard GUI functionality (2nd primary UI). Interface these to a Command Line Interface (1st primary UI) and considering the 3rd UI is IPC (inter process communication abilities and somewht inherent in
From what I have seen of the comments being made on
Or maybe its just arrogance?
The project
Many are not going to realize they cannot see any further than following MS....when it becomes to late.
More info is available on this powerpoint from the Microsoft PDC:
p t
http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/PDC/4118/ARC334.p
Score: 5, Predictable
Shouldn't it be a brother project in this case?
sadly, the opposite will be true. microsoft will sell it to the PHB's as the "best of both worlds" sorta thing. "keep your *nix geeks happy, and get real work done". crap like that. the real questions are can you run the system from the command line without the GUI, doe sthe GUI need to be loaded, can you remotely admin the machine, and will it play nice with others. those are the real questions. and i don't think that is in microsoft's strategy.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
From the article: .NET objects!
One last thing: anything can be mapped to a drive, and drives don't just have to be letters. (Ok, I lied - that was 2) The example I was shown was that the registry was mapped to a drive, and you could navigate it like any other drive, with the results being returned from the commandlet as
From ESR's "Art of Unix Programming"
Quote #1
Unix has a couple of unifying ideas or metaphors that shape its APIs and the development style that proceeds from them. The most important of these are probably the "everything is a file" model and the pipe metaphor[20] built on top of it.
Quote #2
NT has grown by accretion, and lacks a unifying metaphor corresponding to Unix's "everything is a file" or the MacOS desktop
Oooo! So does this mean Windows is finally going to have a unifying idea, something like "everything is almost like a file"?
Ruby on Rails Screencast
Kind of seems like the wrong way to be doing things - surely you should get the basic tools in place BEFORE you add on a GUI? or are they (finally) building the whole of longhorn from scratch rather than bolting new bits on as usual? i'll believe it when i see it.
it also seems too much of a 'one-size-fits-everything' solution for my liking; typically microsoft, but overkill for many things. the beauty of the *nix way of things, IMO, is that you have several different tools to choose from, each doing a few things best, that you can easily link together. don't like one shell? use another. can't do what you want in one line of perl? pipe bash and perl together. with this new object-ified approach that will apparently do everything, what happens when all you want is aliases and filename completion? and if it does, eg, regexps as well as perl, does that mean that they're going to rebuild the whole of perl's functionality within CLI in the next couple of years? and that the CLI will be correspondingly large? imagine if you had to invoke a new perl interpreter (and a bash shell, and a python interpreter, etc etc) everytime you wanted a dir listing...
It is "forest" and not "forrest."
(Note: Ideally, the URL should be (borrowing from Linux somewhat) //machine1/hda1/winnt/system32/ dropping the drive letter entirely.)
It's only a matter of time before Windows offers copies all of the traditional Unix features. That's part of the reason they fund porting efforts for Perl and ship it too.
Now, if Cygwin would tweak Bash to complete the job before MS, I'd be much happier...and have an opportunity to train MS-only admins in the benifits of simple things such as grep and file (currently very handy under Windows) without running into so many artificial limitations of the current way Windows sees all resources.
Gripe: I'd hope that KDE and Gnome stop using the poor excuse for file system links that Windows uses for desktop icons. /home/username/Desktop/dvd should be as accessable as /mnt/dvd -- inside the GUI or the shell -- and transparently to all applications.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Apple releases Panther, updates to iProducts...
GWB releases update (read: spin) on iRaq...
MS releases vaporware on Longhorn...
Take your pick.
They should have used the .NET platform for scripting. It would offer numerous advantages:
.NET virtual machine.
.NET security model.
.NET aware programmers would be able to right scripts without looking for some scripting language manual.
.NET already exists; there are numerous web resources.
.NET is fully object oriented; scripts can be written as classes placed inside compiled code or run from the shell.
.exe for faster execution.
.NET is upgraded, the script capabilities automatically get upgraded.
.NET's advanced COM technology; interoperability with major .NET enabled applications.
.NET for scripting. In Linux, scripting languages have evolved to fully programmable libraries...
1) full programmability from the shell; the script programmer can use linked lists, for example, if she wishes.
2) access to GUI functionality; some times it is desirable
3) an already existing interpreter that can do optimizations on the fly: the
4) the
5)
6) network adminstrators could transfer their scripting skills to development; I know plenty of guys that want to jump from administration to development.
7) documentation for
8)
9) less cost since they would have to maintain one less piece of code.
10) long scripts that run frequently could be compiled to
11) as
12) ability to talk to programs through the
13) direct use of XML and databases from the script.
14) easy networking, using sockets with one line of code.
To my mind, a script is just like a console application, although in source format and not in binary. There is no conceptual difference: a script is a program that someone writes that is not compiled; it runs interpreted. It would be a waste of resources to use anything other than
I'm pretty much exactly like you. Although I do run Debian on my server, and would never consider Windows for that machine.
:)
/stupid /switches /yuck.
My problem with Windows these days - now that some of the problems and instability are no longer issues - is actually boredom. It might sound weird, but when I look at my WinXP desktop it just looks... like a Ford, I guess. Plain, cheap, nothing special, a little rough in places, and ultimatey very boring after a while.
I really love using computers, but WinXP isn't much fun. Maybe I'm just getting tired of the politics of Windows thesedays, even though I know I don't have to care about those anti-MS issues (some do concern me though, eg. privacy).
Oh well just my rant
I'd love to use a Macintosh again, but right now I can't afford to buy the hardware. I've got cheap PCs put together, and to be honest the only software I pay for is games occasionaly.
Until then...
PS. A better terminal shell for Windows would be a welcome addition. Sadly, I can't see it being better than having a Mac or BSD/linux box with bash or whatever you like. Makes me think of all those crummy little MS DOS programs with their
I couldn't even get through the headline without busting a gut. What were those marketers thinking? Are they NUTS?
And the shell, Welcome to MS Hell. I'm already there, baby.
--Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.
when they release version 1.04 of MSH i'll sue them for using my name! and why would microsoft want to name there lastest shell crap after a slashdot linux zealot anyway?
Is this not a major milestone for linux? This is a major case of microsoft being the one playing catchup. Having ignored the CLI for years in favor of the 'easier' GUI crap, this seems like something of a change of direction to me.
How is a filesystem not a direct, shell-accessible API? Shells play quite nicely with filesystems, and in the Unix world, there couldn't be a more standard interface. Also, "100% integrated solution"(s) often aren't all they're cracked up to be. Moron.
What is up with the torrent of Longhorn stories on /. lately? The product is at least two, and more likely three, years away!
/vayprweir/, n.
/.? I already know what I think, you draw your own conclusions.
From the Jargon file:
vaporware:
Products announced far in advance of any release (which may or may not actually take place).
It's vaporware!
Is the frequency of these stories in any way influenced by the fact that Microsoft is a frequent advertiser on
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" - BF
MSH is a mud client for the Ragnarok Mud written in Tcl/Tk.
I'm not going to link to it because I play there and I'm hoping to minimize the slashdot effect by posting anonymously and limiting hits to only those slightly motovated to get confirmation.
Try again, please. I'd like to see it.
You can get MSYS from Mingw.Org for a native Win32 port of bash and most (all?) other binutils tools, plus a few other goodies. Works great and is actually (to me) just a bit more convenient than Cygwin.
Along with MONAD, MS has announced a technology that converts GUI actions into shell commands. This is tentatively named the Command Line Interface Transform (CLIT).
named GONAD ?
I was going to make a clever nad comment. Curses.
Microsoft'S Hell
The ultimate goal of science is to unify all forces of nature to a single law that can be silk-screened onto a T-shirt.
I just can't stop laughing at this.
Bill Gates, on the launch of XP:
Gates said the release of XP "marked the end of an era, the end of DOS and also the end of Windows 95." ... Gates informing the crowd that he agreed with Apple's Jobs that Windows 3.1 was a "crummy operating system," and assuring the crowd that he'd soon say that about Windows 95.
Of course, we remember they used the phrase "end of dos" for the launch of windows 95. Funny how they are now saying the same things about XP they said about 3.1, 95, 98 and ME. That's consistency!
Now, do they have consistancy in shells? They have derided their primary shell, DOS. But what of their other scripting efforts? Remember their "Unix Killer" "New Technology (NT)" and their ksh? Korn does!
I knew that Microsoft had licensed a number of tools from MKS so I came to the microphone to tell the speaker that this was not the "real" Korn Shell and that MKS was not even compatible with ksh88. I had no intention of embarrassing him and thought that he would explain the compromises that Microsoft had to make in choosing MKS Korn Shell. Instead, he insisted that I was wrong and that Microsoft had indeed chosen a "real" Korn Shell.
Ah yes, so portable it was. While NT is dead, csh and ksh trive themselves and in their free counterparts. No new training is required for bash or pdksh.
For an instant, Bill liked Java:
Java is our latest programming tool, and we've got a Java compiler with the highest benchmark feeds, great debugging. Java's -as you know, is a wonderful language, and everybody should have that in their portfolio. (1996)
He tried to make the crowd laugh at Sun in the same speach because he wanted to kill Unix with NT. Where is M$ "java" today?
C# .NET and all look to me like a combination of all the second rate junk they've thrown together in their attempt to emulate and eradicate first rate competitors. "Linux is a Cancer", they say, use our shared source instead. Yeah right.
Oh wait, I see the patterns. EEE, Embrace, Extend, Extinguish followed by "that sucks, buy the new one." You have to be blind to miss it. If you follow the M$ way, you will be constantly sucked for money and time learning their new tweaks.
It's only going to get worse because free software is impossible for them to eat up or beat. Their efforts to stick to their previous marketing plans are wrecked by actually having to compete on merrits and price. This is making them less and less stable. The closed source model can not compete with the free software development model.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I'm all for trying new things in new ways, but it's also good to take stock of old ways. Here's 2 examples that come to mind:
1) I've recently talked to a friend about a problem he was trying to solve. He's on OSX and perl hacker. He wanted a utility to find all the duplicate files on his machine, and was considering writing it in perl or maybe java. We talked about it a bit, and I said I'd approach it by writing the shell script first as a prototype. I wrote it into our IM conversation off the top of my head:
find / -type f -exec md5sum \{\} \; | gawk '{print $2" "$1}' | sort -k 2 | uniq -D -f 1
We looked around and found lots of programs on OSX to do this.. some even for $. But I don't think he even went ahead with coding it... this was good enough.
2) Once I talked to Brewster Kahle, director of the Internet Archive, about their choice of OS/tools (Linux/ext2 and GNU, respectively). Mr. Kahle said GNU tools in bash were the only technology they had found that could process the data at the IA, i.e 300TB+ rolling snapshot of the internet. They'd found some problems in sort I think, but sumitted patches.
So sure, you can do this all again, but somebody is going to have to find that bug in MSH's sort, and they probably won't be able to submit a patch because MS is a proprietary shop.
The UNIX shell is a great inheritance. It's cryptic when you first get into it, but basically, it's that way for terseness.. you can find out how to do almost anything by reading the f'ing manual, or searching the web.
Look, if I intended this to be flamebait, I would have done it anonymously. RTFA, where there is a discussion where they are making a big deal of being able to use scripting language commands from the CLI.
My point was that this has been around forever, but was removed from Windows. Why is it suddenly a great thing to add it back in?
There are API functions that would allow one to build a shell that handles this and many other functions. I remember writing a problem that allowed me to telnet to a remote machine, and one command would acquire a list of process name-ID combos, allowing me a custom "kill (PID)" or "killall (NAME)", although of course if didn't detect certain child processes, still showed more than Process Manager
Which means "cute".
Just like clippy and that freaking dog in the XP search dialog.
Literally, though, "Monada" means "Something done by a monkey".
While Microsoft folks will doubtlessly be wowed by the features and flexibility, it's important to keep in mind that generations of programmers have tried to improve on the UNIX shell. The Symbolics, for example, had a spectactularly powerful, general, and user-friendly command shell, including what Microsoft calls "Intellisense" (yes, that was about 20 years ago) and completion, the ability to manipulate objects with commands, full integration with the preferred programming language (Lisp rather than .NET), and the ability to have objects render themselves in the transcript window graphically, and interact with the mouse.
So, for example, you could type "sd" (which would complete to "Show Directory" by itself, as would other unambiguous abbreviations), you'd get a styled directory listing, and you could click on files to select them, open them, and do other things.
Did it win? No. What people need to understand is that not every improvement is the right thing for the real world. Ksh/bash has hit some sort of sweet spot. People don't use it because it's the technically best, they use it because it has the right set of features.
1. Perl
2. Bash
3. Emacs
4. Autoconf
5. Automake
And too many more to enumerate.
That would at least make it clear who has
the gonads on the block. No wonder they
call it Microsoft's Hell.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Where does your virus want to go today?
Some people try to do thing at the right level, like file things at the filesystem level. And not only that, but they try to fix and benefit from other people errors. For example LUFS, Linux User FS ,capable of mounting things like any other FS, and even using gnome-vfs so all your apps can use it. And maybe one day GNOME's GConf will work from the fs level without intermediaries (gconf-tool), like you do with /proc already.
MS Windowless server 2005
I haven't heard any straight answers. Are they planning to abandon the DOS CLI entirely in favor of MONAD?
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
You can see where they're headed with this - a "shell" which can do anything that can be done in a .NET program. The Un*x equivalent would be a C interpreter as a shell, but without the C low-level orientation. This shell is essentially a .NET interpreter.
The description reminded me of Lisp machines, which have this level of command-line support because they run Lisp all the way down to the bare metal, so the command-line expression language is exactly the same as the OS implementation language.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
I thought this part was very significant. Its starting to exploit the idea of the whole operating system as an object system. I think microsoft has hired away so many academic researchers, that their imput into the windows code base is to turn it into lisp. Im sure the shell has many built-ins and other imerative style libraries, but have command line access to objects I feel qualifies it as a "next generation shell".
The Linux kernel is a product of the c language with c-style function calls and c-style data structures. For any larger OO application, written in C++ for instance, I find myself wrapping many linux system calls into objects which takes a lot of work. GTKmm and glibmm go a long way but I havent found a linuxmm.
If the linux folks think there is something to be gain by making heavier use of objects, I think linux has already got a huge head start. Make use of the huge object system effort of CORBA. GNOME uses ORBit for interobject communication.
ps. I hope someone starts a GNU/GONAD project.
Can someone please explain to me why that comment was modded as 'troll'?
Slashdot moderation is performed via a simple and very effective method. The moderator uses a formula to determine the moderation performed on a post, the formula is:
Moderator's ID number * (Pi/Poster's Karma) + cos(Phase of the moon*sqrt(price of fishcakes in japan))
The result of that is then used to seed a random number generator, which then spits out either "+1: funny, or -1: Troll". Any other moderations are caused by glitches in the matrix.
Hope this answers your question.
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
MONAD: for the one testicled programmer in all of us
"sh script syntax is tortorous. So much easier and maintainable to write perl scripts"
WTF?
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Actually, i'm just wondering how will they name their OS now? "Introducing: MS Windowless Server 2004. Taking you to the next level: CLI"
I don't feel like it...
yet another case of microsoft stealing the intuition of other companies. "Oh look, they have something better than us, let's copy their idea..."
I thought UNIX didn't have GONADs...
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
@P=split//,".URRUU\c8R";@d=split//,"\nrekcah xinU / lreP rehtona tsuJ";sub p{ @p{"r$p","u$p"}=(P,P);pipe"r$p","u$p";++$p;($q*=2) +=$f=!fork;map{$P=$P[$f^ord
($p{$_})&6];$p{$_}=/ ^$P/ix?$P:close$_}keys%p}p;p;p;p;p;map{$p{$_}=~/^[ P.]/&&
close$_}%p;wait until$?;map{/^r/&&}%p;$_=$d[$q];sleep rand(2)if/\S/;print
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Mountain Dew streamed out my nose.
Well done!
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Funny, but one of the arguments against using anything-but-MS is that users would have to learn something that they're not used to.
The nice thing about Unix's "old technology" is that if you learned to use sh/csh/emacs/vi 20 years ago, you can still use them today, and be pretty confident that you'll still be able to use them in another 20 years.
Often, I feel that Microsoft comes up with new things just to keep developers too busy to even think about porting to other platforms. I remember trying to learn about DDE, which was hyped tremendously at the time.
"The idea of a super pipe with more powerful communications between seems intriguing, something using say XML-RPC between the parts instead of just a byte stream."
:)
I disagree.
From the Slashdot book review of ESRs The Art of Unix Programming , I quote ESR:
"A subtle but important property of pipes and the other classic Unix IPC (Interprocess Communication) is that they require communication between programs to be held down to a level of simplicity that encourages separation of function. Conversely, the result of having no equivalent of the pipe is that programs can only be designed to cooperate by building in full knowledge of each others' internals (p 81, Chapter 3)"
It's a pretty nice guarantee that you can combine two given tools that know nothing of each other, even tools which are not related in the slightest way. The power goes to the user. It isn't limited to the functionality the tool's developer thought of. The logic is similar to the reasons behind using a CLI over a GUI.
You can pry my simple IPC from my cold, dead fingers.
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.
This is just the command line version of outlook...
Until Microsoft stops taking the attitude that they know how to do my job better than I know how to do my job, nothing that comes from that camp will be useful to me in my job. When their programs stop getting in my way like an overexcited puppy, they will have gotten to the point where UNIX was a decade ago. I'm not conviced this is a step in that direction.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
yeah, but Linux has balls that clank.
My keyboads not woking popely.
..."newshell" is better than "newcli".
Damn Microsoft. They can never get anything right.
format c:
Of course, the interactive mode is quite usuable. Hmmm...
usermod -s 'which python' yourname anyone?
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
Speaking about innovation, have you seen a shell that is Smalltalk-based, where you can talk to real objects from the operating system?
e ll
http://wiki.gnustep.org/index.php/StepTalk%20Sh
That is part of more complex scripting system that glues together applications, tools and frameworks.
http://wiki.gnustep.org/index.php/Scripting
It is based around GNUstep (Apple's Cocoa-like) framework.
It's like proc on steroids. You can throw around system objects and play with them like javascript (ecmascript, whatever).
Have you ever used javascript? Imagine there was a posix base object. And a socket base object. And a vfs base object that you can extend with other objects so you can use read/write type calls on them.
Now imagine all this in an interpretive command shell.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
You can make your own "special folders", user level file systems, etc. with very little coding. Access to the internals wasn't that hard, but you needed to do a bit of coding. .NET stuff in the OS, you don't really need it.
The problem being MSVC doesn't come with Windows. Now, with this push for lots of
For a non-microsoft developer who's forced to use Windows at times, I'm really intrigued by this.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
Interesting how the catholics define the word monad.
The Unix family tree is starting to look more like a bush.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I doubt this is a coincidence. I'd love it if this meant that MS is working functional concepts into its mainstream software. It might even be a reference to the clever article Unix Pipes as IO Monads. Unfortunately, the short review doesn't offer any hint of this, but frankly the reviewer seemed wowed by pretty uninspired features, so maybe he missed the cool parts. Or, the name might just be a throw-away in-joke.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
Yes, you don't know. But think for a moment: people have had Perl-like languages since the 1960's. Do you really think you or Microsoft are the first to think that using an object-oriented scripting language is a good idea?
The reason why people use sh syntax is because it is enormously effective. Try expressing something like:in Perl or some other scripting language.
Of course, many people who complain about sh syntax really just don't know how to use it.
For interactive use by skilled users and many scripting tasks, bash/ksh is unbeatable. And for the kinds of scripts where Perl makes sense--you can simply use Perl.
This would basically trump anything msh could muster and also provide the entire universe of CPAN to the shell.
Yes, psh is a better version of what msh is trying to achieve. But, you know, even that's nowhere near good enough to dethrone bash/ksh.
Now when I hack into a Windows Box I can do something more than just copy files and run an IRC bot.
:)
If you want something like MSH, just use Python, Jython, Perl, or psh. You see, people have been trying to improve on bash/ksh for years. But none of those have caught on because the sh-family of shells is actually very well adapted to the day-to-day needs of its users.
The shell has been one of the most lacking areas under Windows. I don't know how many times I've dropped into Cygwin or, before that, wasted time writing little C apps just to do basic bulk renaming operations and the likes.
You don't even need all of Cygwin. Just use Perl for that sort of thing. It works great under Windows and even lets you access lots of native Windows functionality.
Unix just preys on people's inability to spell, so they can get some. Unix has much testicular prowess.
...should I use MSH when Cygwin works exactly like a unix shell and is available for more windows versions than MSH is?
Life is like a box of chocolates...
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Let's see, I go to /etc, where all my systemwide configuration is and I walk the configuration like a filesystem, because /etc is on a filesystem! Microsoft had to kluge similar behavior to their shell, because they don't want to give up their beloved registry: source of so-many single point of failure corruption problems? Far better to turn the registry into an actual collection of files on a filesystem so that there is no single point of failure.
Forgive me if I'm not terribly impressed. Only someone unfamiliar with Unix configuration would be impressed by this Microsoft "advancement", because though it offers the same functionality without offering the benefits of distributing the odds of failure.
Ah, someone is attempting to plow through Quicksilver, I see.
commands such as "grep" are optional addons.
/etc/ feature. If we had anything as ugly as a registry, it would be in /proc/
It looks like they're bs'ing their way through mapping the registry to drive letters, much like exporer sees ftp websites. It's nothing like UNIX's marvelous
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/PDC/4118/ARC334.ppt
Consider the alternative. If you use C++ interfaces, then non-object oriented code cannot use the results at all.
Honestly, "results as objects" is just a stretch anyway. I don't understand why object-oriented fans think everything has to be an object. Not everything is best described with an object.
Doesn't anybody at MS think of these things before they're finalized?
Perhaps it's the "security-by-obscurity" mentality that dictates "oh, nobody will ever think of that!"
Bozos!
And, presumably by that prime developer you mention, MS Research has a Haskell-like language for .NET. All the convenience of .NET and its API with none of tha pain in using a sucky language like C++ or C#.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Monads are not a branch of Category Theory, really. They are a categorical construct, such as Adjoints. Monads are used in functional programming as a way to do nonfunctional things such as I/O, mutation, and interaction in a purely functional manner.
This allows Haskell to be a pure functional language, while at the same time a practical programming language... unlike ML languages which opted for adhoc hacks in order to make a functional programming language practical.
If the name for Microsoft's CLI means anything, then expect the commandline to be something like an interactive Haskell interpreter such as Hugs.
Why would Microsoft build such as CLI? Well, first it would have all of the power of Unix like CLIs, but it would also add strong static typing (and static type inference), which means allot as far as correctness and security go.
The resulting shell scripts would also have several useful properties typically only found in purely functional languages, such as referential transparency (WYSIWYG for programming languages), confluence (strong yet flexible determinancy), type safety (correctness, security), and more!
The question is, will such a thing become popular and commonplace in Microsoft's future operating systems? Ha! MS OS users are GUI addicts, and a purely functional CLI would freak them out more than impress them.
Linux could easily and rapidly make such a CLI by hacking an opensource Haskell interpreter such as Hugs. Note that these interpreters are interactive in the sense that you run the interpreter and are presented with a CLI that you use to interact with the interpreter. Interactive interpreters like Hugs are more like a combination between a Unix CLI and the CLI you have in sophisticated calculators.
Pretty cool stuff, if you ask me.
As part of a project I'm working on, I sometimes need to do administrative tasks on a W2K server in another town. If MS would provide a decent shell that has access to the entire OS and an SSH service, remote administration would be relatively painless. VNC over a dialup connection is a pain.
I am going to be pissed if Microsoft is allowed to trademark the mathematical term "Monad". However, considering that the Microsoft fanboys are more impressed with the proposed trivial bells and whistles of this new CLI... I doubt Microsoft will see any need to keep the "Monad" name.
They will probably use newspeak such as "MS XML CLI.Net 10000 XP".
Now I get it. Took me three tries - I was interpreting your reply literally, as in "tcsh is dumb"
Don't know that I've ever seen a phonetic attempt at the rimshot before.
The cure for cancer is coming: Reovirus
Those who do not learn from history are forced to repeat it.
Did anyone else think of "MS Hell" after seeing Microsoft SHell?
And then there is WMI. Here's a little vb script to do the same thing in his example, and it's all built-in to XP/2000 too:
strComputer = "." ' Dot (.) equals local computer in WMI
Set wbemServices = GetObject("winmgmts:\\" & strComputer)
Set wbemObjectSet = wbemServices.InstancesOf("Win32_Process")
For Each wbemObject In wbemObjectSet
WScript.Echo "Name: " & wbemObject.Name & vbCrLf & _
" Handle: " & wbemObject.Handle & vbCrLf & _
" Process ID: " & wbemObject.ProcessID
Next
simply save this a s a .vbs file and then "cscript filename.vbs"
But Microsoft, please, please, please, please, please learn how to write a proper terminal window! The Console in Windows 2000 is the worst every written. Or at least I thought it was until I tried the XP one where MS broke the only good features that the W2K one had. Writing a decent console is a few days work for a decent developer. Please assign the measly amount of money required to make a console that allows you to (1) copy and paste correctly between windows and (2) allows you to cursor up to edit previous commands. (Yes, I know cursor up does something along those lines but I'm yet to figure out exactly. One cursor up certainly doesn't just give you the last command typed afetr a few minutes of use.) Hell, if you had spare time you could even make it transparent 'n' stuff.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Incidentally, one of the most joyous things I heard from the PDC was that the C# and VB.net compilers will ship with the OS (they're currently available free(beer) in the .net framework SDK). Between that, the new winFX API (is it just an API to the Win32 subsystem or a separate subsystem like OS/2 and POSIX used to be?) and the MONAD / MSH announcement, Longhorn sounds like a rather pleasant place to spend a workday.
David Korn beats up some MS marketing drone over an obscure non-Microsoft product that hardly is ever used.
Also the entire premise is wrong, because MS's UNIX Integration product includes the real ksh and not MKS.
Why does this story get repeated so often? It's a pretty lame meme.
When are they going to release the GUI version?
One of the best rants that I have ever read... 4 marks!
What's going to happen when Longhorn comes out and has a kick-ass CLI, 3D hardware accelerated interface, increased stability from .NET, easy file storage, and a version of IE that blocks pop-ups and contains a real download manager (honest--check the latest screenshots)?
Will people still bitch?
"Sufferin' succotash."
Mod parent DOWN. Too bad there's not a "-1, Pointy_Haired_Boss" moderation.
Actually, according to things that they've (MS) said in the past, they were supposed to be thinking about remote management, more powerful scripting, and the like for quite a while now (I remember stuff about a new CLI from MS over 2 years ago). The goal was supposedly to ease remote administration as well as make administration of a local machine more "powerful" by making a more powerful CLI and writing many of the tools so that they can be invoked via CLI as well as graphically. Whether that is the current vision, I haven't a clue.
CLI tools go hand in hand with the shell. If you think Microsoft is willing to develop a new CLI, and use gnu's cli tools, you're mistaken. I could see them using bsd-licenced tools, but look at what my point was within the context of the parent:
If it is the case that Microsoft uses existing tools for this next-gen CLI, I sincerely doubt it will "knock the socks off" what I use :)
Anonymous Cowards that try and yell for moderation are like annoying parents at high school football games that try and tell the referees how to call plays.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
The example I was shown was that the registry was mapped to a drive, and you could navigate it like any other drive, with the results being returned from the commandlet as .NET objects!
Hmm.... doesn't this sound like "/proc filesystem" to anybody? After all, it is very similar to the Registry in some functions...
When is the Kde User Network Tool module going to be finished???
there's already a msh out there, it's in busybox.
let's imagine a typical user session:
I'd love it if this meant that MS is working functional concepts into its mainstream software.
Check this out:
Microsoft F#
ExtremeTech F# Writeup
"its name is MSH (Microsoft SHell)"
Who works in their marketing department? Isn't "Microsoft SHell" a little to close to "MicrosoftS Hell" for them?
-Phat Tony
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
The Minix shell has been around for a very long time. It is even included in busybox. It will be interesting to see what MS does when they find their chosen name has been well used.
-Erik -- --This message was written using 73% post-consumer electrons--
In other news: One of my DNS servers, running a SuSE distro on an old 200MHz Pentium PC w/128 Mb RAM, has clocked 470 days uptime. Here's to 500 and beyond.
GUI? We don't need no steenkin' GUI
Verily, brother. 600+ posts, yet it seems you and I were the only ones who noticed. I guess the rest of them are too busy rolling on the floor over MONAD...
Luke, help me take this mask off
Enough said
MSH, after all, interprets keystrokes to make a computer run commands. Obviously, this technology was stolen from System V UNIX, and represents a massive attempt to misappropriate SCO's *very extensive* intellectual property, and furthermore is clearly designed to destroy the value of SCO's incredible products as well as our massive revenue stream.
If MS does not cease and desist this both criminally- and civilly-actionable thievery, we will not only revoke their UNIX license, we will also require that a)any and all current and future Windows products, now obviously derivitive works of System V UNIX, will be sold with an accompanying SCO IP License costing $699 per CPU, and b) all current users of Windows immediately acquire said license from SCO. No arguments about these products not including MSH or any SCO IP or code will be entertained.
If you have a problem with this, we'll see you in court. Meanwhile, our stock price will continue to rise, and I will continue to slowly sell off the 7,000 shares I bought last April for $7. That's $7 *total* for the 7,000, not $7 per share. That's right. So ante up, Billy, I make a truckload of cash even if I sink the ship. Which I fully intend to do.
Kiss it,
Darl
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
The kernel does indeed treat everything as a file, you just don't know it because Win32 hides the abstraction. The registry, devices, ports, network shares/pipes, mailslots, they are all files under the root .\ namespace.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
Funniest /. post I have read in months.
Yay, updated Common Language Infrastructure! Whoo Whoo!
Command Line? WTF?
[o]_O
So many college students have [VB] as their intro to programming.
Oh my -- seriously? When I was in college, we started out with Scheme/Lisp, then went on to ML, then to Java. We used to curse learning Lisp and ML ("why can't we learn something more useful??") but I think, in the end, we realized we were much better off in our computer science foundation.
The magic of Unix's CLI lies in having lots of small, useful tools that play well together by talking text. It's brilliant and has a 3 decade track record.
Instead, Microsoft wants to have a massive Borg-like internal heap of objects and functions, and give you a text interface to it.
I'd much rather have lots of little, self-sufficient programs that essentially *are* the OS, rather than a new view into the OS.
Yes, having function-level access and object manipulation sounds really cool and orderly compared to the barbaric pipe & grep. But when all goes to h3ll, you'll wish you had text.
Text is universal. Objects and function calls change like the wind.
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had?
I know they're doing the research, and I know you can use F# with CLI today. And I'm sure they wouldn't be doing the research unless someone there thought it could go mainstream. But they're not promoting it to the average developer, so I don't think it counts. Expecting migration to a new, unfamiliar language (even given CLI) seems unfortunately unrealistic. That's why I was thinking they might slip bits of functional programming--without using that name--into other software.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
But, since GNU's Not UNIX, it should obviously have GONADs.
$ make work
make: *** No rule to make target `work'. Stop.
The obvious reason for microsoft to do this is: 1. Create a very bash-like CLI 2. Wait for patent laws to come out 3. Take IP patents of it all 4. Sue every Linux user for using their patented methods for the CLI
Quantum hacker.
I'm using zsh, the one that's inifitely ahead of the best M$ can ever hope for. It'll even auto-complete path names on remote systems without mounting those systems over NFS or Samba.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Simon Peyton Jones: " I spend a most of my time on the design and implementation of the language Haskell. In particular, much of my work is focused around the Glasgow Haskell Compiler"
cpeterso
closed source. You get the whole "developer" kit with the OS (minus the Sun Forte suite... BOO HISS). And lots of documentation and ability to automate and tweak the thing as desired.
Perhaps MS is "making up" for adding DRM by appealing to developers/admins exposing all the things we can do clearly. Trade some obfuscation for openness.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Linux CLI interfaces evolved within a natural selection framework from an ancient interface to the modern ones. In this process, all kinds of idiosyncrasy survived that aren't needed anymore, but you have fabulous CLI interfaces like IPython where you can easily transform and query a bunch of data and throw it away. Now they will develop a CLI interface testing it with developers. Soon opensource will have to catch windows.
I thought 'NONADS' would be more descriptive.
People using a "Unix" derivative OS probably should not yuck it up about naming something "NONADS".
Man, did Bill Gates come to your home, spit in your face, hold a gun to your head while he raped your wife (and made her enjoy it), and then spank your kids' asses? He must have, seeing as how pissed off you are at him.
Now, having said that, I must say I agree. MS is doomed. Doomed I tell you! Let's sing the doom song now.
Doom, doom, doom... doom, doom...
Am i the only one here thinking 4DOS / 4NT? It's really amazing they didn't get to add those features until now. I guess it has a lot to do with the way they see their client base and the usability of their systems. I do hope they choose a standard and keep it, for I have surely went mad in the past trying to port applications / scripts to newer versions.
However, I ain't jumping for joy yet...
I remember DOS (shudder), the best thing M$ did with DOS is marginalize it. But they spent the last 8 years moving away from CLI, and devaluing it within the OSes. So now they put one back in and we're supposed to believe that it will be a useful tool?
IF MONISTAT, or whatever they want to call it, was a natural growth of DOS, including a relevant tool-set, I'd be mroe inclined to be charitable. But, given the track record in Redmond for getting right the first time (or the second, third etc. etc.) I think I'm not going to bother holding my breath...
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
There is one of those for CDE
My bad- F# is based on ML, not Haskell. I had thought it was based on Haskell, and assumed (note I said "presumably") that he was a part of that project, considering his knowledge in the area.
.NET languages that are Haskell-based, though not being done by Jones or anyone else at MSR.
I had confused this with Mondrian and Haskell.NET, other functional
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Actually the MS thingy is going to be named Nomad, not Monad, and we'll get to make bad jokes refering to old Star Trek movies
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
no, no...its called Microsoft's Hell
Anyone interested in porting clippy to bash? ;-)
[Please type your sig here.]
We need a best posts ever top 10, and this should be the top one.
Ingenious.
My stomach is hurting from laughter.
when people find out you're really a troll?
Ooops, seems to have already happened. BTW, it isn't wise to brag about it in your journal.
Plz fx K thx!
MSH, not too concerned about it for the following reasons:
- Microsoft will bugger it up some how
- Microsoft can't read a POSIX standards document
- the system is more likely to lock up or crash before finished
- if it doesn't crash, it might get hacked
- NT/2000 admins flip burgers and click icons. Script, editor... your tasking their brains too much.
... and even then, neither of them are a shell.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Putting filesystem features in the shell is a stupid idea. What if you want to use another shell? Instant uselessness.
On the other hand, 'smbsh' is a funky idea compared to say, 'smbfs', so who knows...
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Call me crazy, but shouldn't you just pipe to a separate program to do that stuff? Since when did a shell need to add new features to do something an external program can to?
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Bash and pretty much any UNIX shell can already "mount the registry like a drive and walk it like a filesystem":
"mount", "cd", and "ls"
Sound familiar?
Unix configuration settings are in files, which mean that they're on the filesystem, which, um, can be walked like a filesystem.
"Microsoft innovation"? **YAWN**
may be more applicable. Buy an MS product and they have you by the MONADs.
Oh well, what the hell...
phyynx wrote:
>
> One must remember, M$ has hundreds of the best and brightest operating system delvelopers
BWAHAAAAAHAHAHAAA!!!!!!!!!!
And Windows is still an abysmally useless mess.
They've programmed themselves in to a gordian knot and all we have to do is sit back and chuckle.
now do we _have_ to type C+A+D to reboot? ;)
If the cursor moves randomly ... NOMAD ... SOBAD, MYBAD ... POPAD ... CANTADD ... OLDGRANDAD ... NORAD
If it is just horribly buggy
If every time you try to run the shell, it spams you with paid advertisements
If it has problems with for loops
If its syntax drives you to drink
And if hackers use it to root the system and trigger a catastrophe
--
So basically Microsoft, in their fine tradition of creating an confusion in terms, made a "shell" that can't run programs but instead runs "managed code" (aka shared libraries in dotnet environment) and maintains all objects inside itself, but has a syntax that is confusingly similar to Unix shell pipes. The concept is obviously flawed -- Unix shell uses Unix-specific unified file descriptor model, that Windows lacks, so while in Unix shell is often used to process easily-parseable text using pipelines of programs (some remote) and any overcomplication of data passed between programs is frowned upon, in Windows the most convoluted ever format is being used to exchange things between "programs" that are sitting in the belly of that "shell". They could just as well make the whole interface an UML editor.
If anything, it can prevent some people who learned that shit from switching to Unix -- they will until the end of their miserable lives associate pipelines with shitloads of DLLs instead of streams of text.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
So a new CLIT (CLI Technology) named GONAD?
Cool!
gnu-nads?
So does this mean Windows is finally going to have a unifying idea, something like "everything is almost like a file"?
.NET and 2003, we're getting there. The idea that "everything is a file" has its merits, but its limitations also - not least being the only way to move data between processes in it is as streams of text, there's little support for moving strongly-typed objects around (and no, CORBA is no a solution to that).
Windows philosophy, incompletely realized to be sure, is "everything is a COM object". With
If they can get the shell to parse something like this correctly:
grep.py -v ^happy sad.txt | more
I will be happy.
To the uninitiated, under the MS Windows (DOS) command line, the shell does not handle the pipe properly - passing the '| more' to my program's argv list, instead. Additionally, the ^happy (which is regular expression syntax for 'look for happy only at the begining of the line') search parameter gets passed in the argv list as just 'happy' - forcing me to surround it with double quotes to force the ^ to be included. A program in application space should not have to handle these things (which must be happening with dos executable programs) - the shell should do it instead.
This works fine under any *nix shell on Sun boxes as well as Linux machines. If they can get these basic things right, I will be impressed (it's about time, too).
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain