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."

Comments

3 months...

[heironymouscoward]

...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?

The Best of All Possible Worlds

[Raedwald]

'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.

Better served by a standard *nix shell

[ezavada]

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.

Much of this could be done in linux...

[Ars-Fartsica]

...if people would be willing to drop sh/bash etc and adopt a more compelling, orthogonal approach like psh (perl shell) or something entirely new.

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.

You don't need eyes to see where they are going.

[twitter]

Well, errr, you can't really tell where they are going at all. They have derided scripting with their idiotic GUI bet which they claim is incompatible with scripting. Well it was on their platform because they spagetti coded everything into the GUI. A brief look back shows where they have been with CLI. It also shows that Microsft really can't compete and those who stick with them are in for a bad ride.

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.