Subj : Re: Windows vs Linux
To   : tenser
From : boraxman
Date : Wed Apr 27 2022 23:02:29

 te>  bo> Treat '/' as an escape character.  Always.  Thats it.
 te> 
 te> Nope.  See what I wrote above, re-read your response,
 te> and try to figure out how that would work.  Particularly
 te> since the pathname separator in both the shell and home
 te> directory fields is '/' in /etc/passwd.
 te> 
The escape character means the next character is to be taken literally and not translated.

//etc//password

Or, if you had a colon delimited file, you would insert colons which were not to be taken as separators as /:

\\n would mean take the newline as a literal, and not an end of record.

 te> Actually, lexical analysis of strings literals with embedded
 te> quotes escaped by backslashes is a trivial regular expression:
 te> /"(\.|[^\\"])*"/
 te> 
 te> Again, PowerShell is 15 years old.
 te> 

How has it changed the use of Windows for users such as me?  Remember, most users are like me, not software developers.

 te>  bo> What you don't see, is developers leveraging existing tools, existing
 te>  bo> capabilties, and stringing them together to solve problems.
 te> 
 te> That is blatantly false.  This is exactly how software is
 te> built these days.  Have you ever done professional software
 te> development?
 te> 

I just don't see it.  The basic paradigm is the same now as it was in 1999.  You may have data in an excel spreadsheet, to extract the data, you have to open Excel, select the "File -> Open" option, open the file, use Excels search functionality, find the record containing the key you need, navigate to the cell which has the data you want, CTRL-C, then switch to where you want to put the data, put your mouse pointer there, CTRL-V.  Repeat.

The OS makes it *slightly* easier in that you can double click the file in Explorer to open it, if the file is accessible via Explorer, which may not be the case on a bespoke cloud storage system.

The paradigm is unchanged.  The data belongs to Excel, it is accessible only through Excel, or perhaps a custom piece of code, maybe.  We are still using computers in terms of managing applications.

You might say "so what", in which case, I think that is the result of a lack of imagination.  Data, such as product master data, should be independent of an application.  It should be part of the system, the system being the computing environment.  Make data a first class citizen, data belongs to the user, not the app, and make it available for any piece of code to refer to.

In this respect, one can store product master data, and then use that data to generate a document, or use it to validate data, or to run queries about inventory.  We need this functionality, and you can tell this because what business does, is it seeks software which does all this, such as a Quality Management System.  The thing is ,these systems are operating systems in and of themselves, which is why they tend to stagnate, development and customisation is difficult, and outside the scope of what the business can do itself because it is the vendors own specific solution, instead of one leveraging core OS components and tools.  The result is sub-par, slow, error prone and costly, but no one can see any better, because we're stuck with this idea that computers are there to run Applications.

Maybe Windows is ready to do this, perhaps, but it just plain hasn't resulted in practical change.  

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