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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."
This is one of those situations where I think MS is doing a serious NIH (Not Invented Here) for no good reason. I can understand the reason to make Direct X instead of use OpenGL (for controll) and other such decisions. But I don't think having their own shell (instead of an implementaion of BASH) does them any good. I don't think it helps them sell more software. I don't think it helps them controll the market more. They should have taken BASH, and extended it with their .NET stuff.
I can use BASH on Linux, BSD, BeOS, OSX, and many many others. Why should I have to learn a new shell for Windows? Why can't they just accept it for once. It doens't cost them anything. If anything it would make porting apps over to Windows from other platforms EASIER.
At least make it so I can replace my shell easily (like you can change your default shell on other platforms)? That would be enough for me.
It's not exactly MS's fault that their current shell isn't very good. They've been going pure GUI and trying to keep people there. They've said DOS is dead and no one should ever have to use a CLI. So they've had no reason (based on that) to improve the shell since it's last incarnation, DOS 6.22. Of course now they are making a new CLI and making a big deal over it. Everything old is new again, eh?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
There's already a plethora of shells out there, -- korn, bash, csh, zsh, and way more. And combined with ultilies like find, sed, grep, awk and with the added availablity of languages like perl, python, 'c' and all the lexical mulitude of routines that go with,
Microsoft should consider cooperating and improving what's already out there instead going it alone and reinventing the wheel. Unless, of course, all those old school Unix developers were really all wrong and now Microsoft's is taking the opportunity to show us how it's really done.
The actual versions of commands seem entirely too object oriented and thus too verbose.
I can't imagine anybody who has ever used a CLI object-orienting it. Did some marketing drone get a say in the design.
The command line is more likely to be used for quick-and-dirty jobs, but the language involved (Bourne, C shell, etc...) can scale up to a larger, more maintainable project. The same can't be said about most object-oriented languages in the downward direction. Of course, maybe I just haven't seen the right ones.
If the right objects are already made and easy to use, then OOP is great for programming. If you have to worry about designing an object hierarchy when what you really want is a result, then it's a chore.
If we were ants living on a Rubik's cube, differential geometry would be a little more confusing.
Yes, everything's dandy, until you happen to be using two programs that don't export and import data in compatible formats.
In the *IX world, stuff moves around in simple text formats. You can glue *any* two programs together, even if the original author didn't intend that you do so.
In the Microsoft world (well, the new Microsoft world), you can glue together programs that are designed to be glued together.
Note that Plan 9 did some similar stuff to this (IIRC there was a project called xmlterm that deal with program output that wasn't purely text). It didn't catch on. Dunno how many programs could parse said output, though, or whether it was intended for data representation directly to the user.
On the other hand:
a) Microsoft has clearly realized that administrators need a good shell environment and they have not been providing it. This is a Good Thing, and they get points for picking up on this and trying to do something about it. This may be a positive new start. I dunno who started this project, but they clearly weren't blinded by NIH -- people like Linux partly because there's very little NIH associated with it. People like the *IX shell, and Microsoft is responding. Thumbs up on that.
b) Microsoft is clearly doing something with their Microsoft Research people that is actually going into the OS, and trying to push the envelope instead of just copying. (While the Plan 9 thing above is *similar*, this is not just something they bought from someone.) That also is good.
May we never see th
Well I can answer that for one. Old school hackers need the steak and the beer on the table too and microsoft pays pretty well. I guess would be thankful if some of the old school hackers got into microsoft and did something about their software.
> I would love to see an improved command shell.
So would all geeks who use Windows. WinFS gets a lot of hype, but it is Monad
that will drive the next batch of upgrades for Microsoft, especially in server
space. A good command shell is a killer feature.
I remember an online poll in about 1999 or 2000, asking what effect Linux would
have on Microsoft. "Force them to change radically" was the option I voted
for. Monad is the sort of thing I meant. A good command shell is one of the
strengths of most POSIX systems; formerly Microsoft could argue it wasn't worth
the licensing costs of a commercial Unix just to get a command line that only
geeks would use, but now you see them arguing instead, "We're going to have
that too." And they will. And lo, it will be a major improvement.
And they already moved from the 95/98/Me line to the NT line -- at least
partly because the free unices have good solid memory protection, and "it
crashes all the time" was a criticism they couldn't get around with 95/98.
They're also going to have to ship a decent text editor. They're the only
major OS left that doesn't ship with both vi and Emacs. I don't think they'll
ever ship those per se (though of course both are available for Windows --
but so is bash for that matter), but they're going to have to come up with
something that blows the everliving socks off of Notepad, mark my words.
Microsoft will tell you that open source doesn't innovate much; it mostly
copies. And that's got some truth in it. But open source is not alone in
that. Everyone copies the competition's good features. It's the same reason
all fast food restaurants today have kids' meals with toys and a drive-through
window. One chain introduced it, and it was a killer feature, and so everyone
has to have it now.
Competition is what makes us stretch, and do things we didn't want to bother
doing otherwise.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.