Slashdot Mirror
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."
Google has a new command shell coming out as well; the name? Gonad.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
Because I unfortunately have to hack on a windoze box, I would love to see an improved command shell.
The current command shell just plain sucks when compared to OSX's or KDE's shells.
I can't wait to install.
truth={ moz: "sweet" }
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.
And I can't say I'm that impressed yet. I'd like to see man pages or something actually implemented. man currently does stuff but man doesn't work for any command I've tried (thus there don't seem to be *any* options). There's a lot of aliases built-in to emulate Unix (e.g. ls, ps) but the lack of grep makes piping seem...well pointless. The actual versions of commands seem entirely too object oriented and thus too verbose. "get-directory" is not something I want to type (I can't remember off the top of my head, but some of them are really absurd). "ps" is ps for a reason. No frequently used command should be more than 4 letters, or require you to use aliases so you don't end up writing a novel.
Your milaage may vary. I don't care about a scripting language. I have Perl (for Win32). As far as an interactive shell, it still has a lot of rough edges. Personally, I'd rather just use Cygwin/Bash and get a real shell.
(Though I talked to one of the guys personally and he seems pretty cool.)
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
...what the HELL were old school hackers doing working for microsoft in the first place. ;)
Go to http://beta.microsoft.com, login with your passport account.
:)
The guest id is mshPDC.
Go nuts.
Check out Mon and Mon.cgi
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.
Basically, Monad formalizes in .NET the pipe interface between shell programs. A pipe participant is just something that implements the appropriate "commandlet" interface: it receives some input, produces some output, maybe some errors.
However, in the case of Monad the input and output can be anything, not just text. So in the example:
- get-process | where "handlecount -gt 400" | sort handlecount | out-chart processname,handlecount
The get-process command produces a sequence of processes; where filters it based on an attribute; sort sorts on an attribute, and out-chart produces a textual table of the filtered output.It's important that the input and output of these processes are structures (actually, objects, but I don't want to tickle anyone's prejudices about OOP). .NET knows at runtime about the attributes these structures can have, so you can write apps that manipulate a wide variety of object types: files, metadata-annotated documents, log entries, whatever.
Naturally input/output can be pure text, allowing all the traditional Unix commands such as grep.
Immediate benefit? If you have the right translator, there's no need to munge text output using awkward tools like tr, cut, awk and so on, just to get at the process ID column of ps or the URL column of the Apache log file.
This is better than Unix shells.
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
Illustrated here.
Reminds me of the "Magical Microsoft Moments" story:
I've been attending the USENIX NT and LISA NT (Large Installation Systems Administration for NT) conference in downtown Seattle this week.
One of those magical Microsoft moments(tm) happened yesterday and I thought that I'd share. Non-geeks may not find this funny at all, but those in geekdom (particularly UNIX geekdom) will appreciate it.
Greg Sullivan, a Microsoft product manager (henceforth MPM), was holding forth on a forthcoming product that will provide Unix style scripting and shell services on NT for compatibility and to leverage UNIX expertise that moves to the NT platform. The product suite includes the MKS (Mortise Kern Systems) windowing Korn shell, a windowing PERL, and lots of goodies like awk, sed and grep. It actually fills a nice niche for which other products (like the MKS suite) have either been too highly priced or not well enough integrated.
An older man, probably mid-50s, stands up in the back of the room and asserts that Microsoft could have done better with their choice of Korn shell. He asks if they had considered others that are more compatible with existing UNIX versions of KSH.
The MPM said that the MKS shell was pretty compatible and should be able to run all UNIX scripts.
The questioner again asserted that the MKS shell was not very compatible and didn't do a lot of things right that are defined in the KSH language spec.
The MPM asserted again that the shell was pretty compatible and shouldwork quite well.
This assertion and counter assertion went back and forth for a bit, when another fellow member of the audience announced to the MPM that the questioner was, in fact David Korn of AT&T (now Lucent) Bell Labs--the author of the Korn shell.
Uproarious laughter burst forth from the audience, and it was one of the only times that I have seen a (by then pink cheeked) MPM lost for words or momentarily lacking the usual unflappable confidence.
The fine thing with a shell is that when you have issued the same series of commands numerous times you can simply put them in a script - automation done!
However MSH seems (with its OO-influenced design) to be a bit too complex for ordinary work. If people dont use it for ordinary work, they cant write scripts "for free".
The problem today isnt that Windows cant be scripted - it can via VBScript.
UNIX shells are constructed the way they are because users should BOTH use them for scripting, and for every other task. M$ compromises with simplicity (with its OO-design), so MSH will never be as productive as, for example tcsh.
..or is this indicative of a wider trend, where Windows and Linux are coming together from a technology perspective?
Think about it. Over the past few years, the windowing environments in Linux have grown more and more advanced. With the newer XOrg releases and upcoming KDE4 and Gnome 3, I expect amazing things from the Linux desktop.
Meanwhile, while Linux has been addressing it's core weakness, Microsoft already has a firm foothold on the desktop. Instead, the past few years they have been integrating more and more sysadmin-friendly technologies - such as integrating scripting into the OS, improving their command shell (and replacing it - hence Monad), improving remote administration.
Windows has WinFS, Linux has Reiser4 + plugins.
In the next few years, I doubt a layman will be able to tell Windows and Linux apart from a purely features / technology perspective. What *ill*be important, is he thing that is the most important - who do you trust with the source code to your OS? A private company or a group of hackers.