Microsoft Releases A New Monad Command Shell Beta

Watercooler Warrior writes "Slashdot originally broke the news that a new Microsoft command shell was in the works when a reader noticed a suspicious job posting by Microsoft India. Today Microsoft released the first really usable version of the shell (codenamed Monad) to beta testers - and anyone who carefully reads the WinHEC slides about Monad will find how to join the beta and get a peek at it. The shell looks like a bunch of old-school Unix and Perl hackers were given free rein to do what they wanted with the .NET framework, and from what is known about the backgrounds of the Monad developers this is probably pretty close to the truth."

Comments

Re:Monad == ??

[Kumkwat]

First thing I thought when I saw Monad was its definition from category theory. A Monad is a triple, containing a functor, and 2 natural homomorphisms.

Less cryptic, is its use in Haskell as way of parameterizing computations. Specifically its used to produce the I/O Monad which is parameterized by some type A in the pair IO : a -> world -> (a, world).

More in line with ur question, the word Monad comes from greek , and it means "one" "single " or "unique". So I guess they think this is a "unique" bit of work.

Access for Monad Beta

[Plake]

Go to http://beta.microsoft.com, login with your passport account.

The guest id is mshPDC.

Go nuts. :)