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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."
...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
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.
You can do WinFS filtering through the "|" symbol. MONAD can also export natively to: HTML, XML, Excel, or plain command text in either a Table or List format.
.NET handles whether the user types "-?" or "/?", so you don't have to care anymore!
Sure beats the hell out of using obscure grep commands to parse a blob of ascii.
And....the commandlets are developer friendly. You can make a commandlet by inheriting from the commandlet base class, and adding attribute tags to the public properties to make them parameters to the commandlet.
Sounds pretty easy for a developer to extend.
This is a good thing for MS to do. The slashbots are always whining about how MS takes standards and breaks them for it's own gain. Rather than taint your precious bash or perl, they started from scratch.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.