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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."
Anyone who wants to do a bit of scripting on Windows has vbscript, javascript, perl, tcl/tk, and a plethora of other options.
This is going to be for headless servers. So you can ssh into a box and administer it remotely, or through a dumb terminal on a serial port, etc, etc..
There's no good reason your mailserver or each machine in your SQL Server farm needs a GUI.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
You get rated 'Insightful' for stating what OpenSource zealots hope. What if this shell actually knocks the socks off *sh?
What if Longhorn does indeed provide more security, not only in default settings, but more inherently in the OpenSource?
Do you think the average developer/manager at MS is dumber than your average OS participant? (This is not a tric.. Damn, I'm falling in myself..)
But really - if "we" are to compete, we will have to steal the ideas that "work" from MS camp, just as they're "stealing" "our" ideas that WORK.
Linux is narrowing the gap to MS on the desktop (albeit slowly), and MS is narrowing the gap to Unix on eg. CLI, stability and security. Their software matures too, you know..
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.
Unable to read configuration file '/bigassraid/htdig//conf/14229.conf'
Geocrawler error message.
Funny eh. They're moving away from the registry back to services that run with conf files. And they're doing CLI only versions of their OSs for ease of remote configuration. Why not just port all their stuff to some free unix-like OS?
Get your own free personal location tracker
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
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
You get rated 'Insightful' for stating what OpenSource zealots hope.
No, you get rated insightful for noting what MS has done in the past, and extrapolating the future of their next products based on that.
What if this shell actually knocks the socks off *sh?
That would be nice.
Keep in mind that this isn't a contest. MS has some very nice features burried in their software, and that's great. If MS Windows is ever a better platform choice than the free operating systems out there, I say great!
Woefully, it will still not be the platform I use. Why? Because I require the ability to fix bugs, apply patches on my own timetable (sometimes so fast that my vendor doesn't even know about them yet), and generally control my systems behavior.
Windows does not give me that.
What if Longhorn does indeed provide more security, not only in default settings, but more inherently in the OpenSource?
Security is not a "thing", it's a process. You don't ship your OS in a box with a "NOW WITH 20% MORE SECURITY" sticker and get more security. Longhorn's security will be poor as long as Microsoft continues to deprioritize it in favor of market share. I see no evidence that that has changed since the days of NT4.
Do you think the average developer/manager at MS is dumber than your average OS participant?
No, of course not. The problem is that the average MS employee is working on what a mid-level manager decided he would be working on, based on a company directive from on high that is motivated mostly by marketting. The reason Open Source software tends to be so much more USEFUL, even when it lacks many seemingly obvious features, is the fact that it's created, maintained and refined by those who need it the most. Shells don't seem all that well designed to developers and manageres... and that's because they're not for developers and managers. They're primarily use by sysadmins. A developer spends most of their time in an editor and/or using a rule-based system like make. The shell is just a tool for odd jobs, and many IDEs and feature-laden editors like emacs and vim pretty much suplant the need to use the shell 90% of the time. Sysadmins do not have that luxury.
Look at the MS shell. It is clearly being designed by developers for developers. The ability to manage excel data from the shell is not something that targets the needs of anyone who will have to use this shell routinely. Why is it there? That sort of thing scares me right off the bat, and tells me that this is not a sysadmin tool. Developers under Windows already have very nice tools in their IDEs to script all sorts of interaction with every part of the system that they need. Managers and desktop workers will never want/need a shell.
So ask yourself, which will be more useful: cygwin's bash port to Windows or msh? I can ssh into my Windows box and do admin today, and it requires no msh at all. Why do I need this beast?
But really - if "we" are to compete, we will have to steal the ideas that "work" from MS camp, just as they're "stealing" "our" ideas that WORK.
No, you don't have to steal anything. First off, let's disabuse ourselves of the notion that anything in a shell is new. Shells have existed for decades that do everything msh is (so far) claiming to do. Most of them died a quick death for lack of use.
Next, the most valuable thing that MS has done in the last few years is to put pressure on other OSes to use features that were long available. For example, MS had a journaling fileysystem. Journaling was not new, it was just kind of hard to get right, and all of the implementations out there were fairly speical purpose or closed source. When MS demonstrated that an end-user OS could indeed benefit from having such a feature, dozens of porojects sprang up to take this long-implemented wheel and re-invent it for open source oses.
This sort of "test environment in the large" is very valuable, and MS has alway