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this hackernews article is partially about fighting over whether these unix commands are better or worse than a program called 'replace' that someone wrote:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5107491
People go back and forth; the existing commands are already a basis, so everyone should learn them; vs. this common operation is convoluted with those commands, so it is better. It seems to me that the obvious answer is that both are useful, maybe at different times or maybe to different users, just like sed is still around now that we have perl.
But if everytime something like this comes up we tack on a new command, we get too many commands.
So, i think we need a periodic refactoring of the basis set of unix tools. Perhaps even some kind of voting system to add popular commands or to bless one proposed refactoring out of the others.
Of course, the real question is, how to implement that socially.
Links:
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some guy's wishlist for windows shells: "Wishlist: tmux, emacs, vi, netcat, shell option for vi-mode, rc-file with preferences, ncurses library, something simpler than curses, zip and unzip. 256 colour is fine, although 24-bit would be impressive. /proc would be cool, but also a big ask I assume. They already have a strong compiler. Make it really easy to find the hex fingerprint required to log on to the sshd-server. Something like inetd could be useful, too. " -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9647654
some replies:
" No thankyou. I can certainly understand including SSH support, but I don't want what is pretty much the only remaining viable non-Unix platform to start bundling horribly dated and clunky Unix-like commands and bloated GNU tools.
reply
wumbernang 5 hours ago
Couldn't agree more.
As a die hard Unix guy and ex Slashdot-esque zealot (colloquially a bit of a twat). Yet I'm knocking out PowerShell? all the time now and dread having to log into the pile of CentOS? kit I have lying around. It is arcane. Even after 15 years I spend most of my time in the manpages or working out another damn config format.
Literally did a two liner to scrape a web page, parse it and call a REST endpoint with the parsed data as JSON in PowerShell?. I cant even use python now. I've been broken.
It makes me cringe saying all this as well kind of like a racist making amends with his past.
The only thing I still hate is windows update. "
