Subj : Re: Windows vs Linux
To   : boraxman
From : tenser
Date : Sat Apr 23 2022 03:03:35

On 22 Apr 2022 at 08:51p, boraxman pondered and said...
 
 bo>  te> Yes, that's the point.  These things are tools.  People who
 bo>  te> care about the interface and shell and all of that are focusing
 bo>  te> on the tool, not the application of that tool.  Most people do
 bo>  te> not -- and should not -- care.
 bo>  te> 
 bo>  te> So those are the sorts of superficial differences that don't
 bo>  te> really matter.  Being a hobbyist and futzing around with window
 bo>  te> managers and shells stuff is fine, but you can do that with many
 bo>  te> systems.  That's really not where the focus in the Linux
 bo>  te> community is.
 bo> 
 bo> The shell is a tool, the interface is a tool.  I use the shell to solve
 bo> problems, work things out.  Using a Mac at work, I used the shell to
 bo> manage data, run queries and provide formatted output and validation
 bo> from CSV data.

And how is that relevant to the ability to customize your .zshrc
file or whatever?  Do you really think you couldn't do the same
thing with powershell or wsl or whatever?  The ability to customize
your shell experience is only tangentially related to the ability
to script a shell to do something useful with the Unix filter model.
Indeed, if you want to write scripts to do useful things, in many
ways it's best NOT to rely on customizations, so that those scripts
are portable -- not just to other machines and environments, but
even to other users.

 bo> Computers store and manipulate data.  The Unix shell allows you to
 bo> manipulate and transform data in ways that you describe, and create
 bo> functionality which may not already exist in other programs.

I've never argued against the utility of the Unix shell.  This is
a strawman in the context of this discussion, which is about customizing
one's environment.

That said, it's important to recognize the limitations of the
shell.  As anyone who has to work with a variety of structured
data formats knows, it can break down pretty quickly; VM/CMS
pipes and PowerShell both do rather better in this domain than
most Unix shells.

Since you mentioned CSV, it's interesting to look back at, "The
Practice of Programming" by Kernighan and Pike, which discusses
the difficulty of parsing CSV files in the shell.  This is coming
from the same Kernighan and Pike who wrote, "The Unix Programming
Environment" and who worked in the same lab as Dennis Ritchie and
Ken Thompson.

Unix tools are useful.  But it does no one any service not to
recognize their limitations.

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