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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."
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
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
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.
C:\> winword.exe
.___
// \
||@@|
|| ||
|\_||
\__/
_||_
It looks like you're trying to run a program. Would you like me to start WINWORD.EXE? [Y/N]
'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.
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
There's no good reason your mailserver or each machine in your SQL Server farm needs a GUI.
No kidding...that's why we don't use Windows.
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.
Yeah, yeah, that's right...and MONAD has some interesting development tools...including Structured Application Code (SAC), to hang your scripts off of, and SHell Accessible File Types (SHAFT), that gives you really big, long file names, and a firewall library via the Active Network Usage System (ANUS), that lets you monitor any nasty packets your box might be dumping, and it's all tied together with some really interesting primitves provided by the Basic Integrated Graphical Handle And Input Recognition Yoking Bridge And Link Library System. (BIGHAIRYBALLS). Sounds promising!
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
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.