Evrone Blog

First of all - Linuxes and alike desperately need something like this shell becoming standard. And second - I always wonder how all these great minds who where throwing rubbish at Microsoft ever since... somehow forgot to mention that same company created important product called PowerShell like 20 years ago. And you know PowerShell is so good already you can easily drop it in any OS/X, Linux and it actually works. No one, except for Jeffrey Snover figured it out on time, there is great interview here - https://evrone.com/blog/jeffrey-snover-interview.

But for PowerShell to become Python on Perl steroids on top of all the .NET and COM+ there is, well, of course it took years, and top engineers to work on it, but also was needed an unified interface (API) to the underlying OS magic. Which is not there in Linux the same sense .NET became "available". OS/X has something similar to COM+ called CORBA which was left half-baked at best. Python is not .NET, sorry. Not anywhere near.

Someone may say the UNIX ideology is about your programs doing one thing at time, and having this STDIN->munch->STDOUT approach. But these streams never got any structure, and ppl out there been creating great tools to fill this gap, tools such as - jq, mlr, xidel to name a few. perhaps we should include ack, ag and rg in the list.

You know, guys, you hard-loving bash die-hards and sed+awk magicians, you should give this PowerShell thing a try before inventing the wheel again. And before legacies you…

> Companies started to use it as an alternative to C and C++, while in reality it's an alternative to python. Just like in python a lot of the work and warnings are tied into the linter as a clear workaround. Our linter config has something like 70+ linters classes enabled, and we are a very small team.

I thought the main "let's migrate our codebase to Go" crowd had always been from the Java folks, especially the enterprise ones. Any C/C++ code that is performant is about to get a hit, albeit small, from migrating to a GC-based runtime like Go, so I'd think that could be a put off for any critical realtime stuff - where Rust can be a much better target. And, true for both C++ and Java codebases, they also might have to undergo (sic) a major redux at the type/class level.

But yes, the Googlers behind Go were frustrated by C++ compile times, tooling warts, the 0x standard proposal and concurrency control issues - and that was primal for them, as they wanted to write network-server software that was tidy and fast [1]. Java was a secondary (but important) huge beast they wanted to tackle internally, IIRC. Java was then the primary language Googlers were using on the server... Today apparently most of their cloud stuff is written in Go.

[1] https://evrone.com/blog/rob-pike-interview

> why invent PowerShell, why not just use ksh or bash? I’m a long time Unix dev so that was my first instinct. I tried and failed. There is a core architectural difference between Unix and Windows. Linux is a file-oriented OS and Windows is an API-oriented OS. In Linux, if you can modify a file and run a process, you can manage anything. That is why awk, sed, and grep are management tools. At the time, nothing on Windows worked that way. Everything was behind an API which returned a structured object. That is why awk doesn’t work with WMI, sed doesn’t work with Active Directory, and grep doesn’t work against the registry. I had to invent a new tool that manipulated this environment.

- Jeffrey Snover, Powershell Inventor.

https://evrone.com/blog/jeffrey-snover-interview

Literally designed not to copy bash.

I believe the Ruby designers have refused to add syntax for type hints, so they need to either be in comments on separate lines from the code itself or even in a separate file. They are therefore less ergonomic to use - but the increased separation from the code means that they are mostly used purely as (machine-verifiable) comments. On the other hand Python's type hints tend to be deeply intertwined with the code, and are even required to access new language features such as dataclasses.

The two languages take such different approaches because their designers have different feelings about static typing. Guido and the Steering Council seem to want Python to be as statically-typed as possible, whereas Matz thinks "static type declaration is redundant" [0].

[0] https://evrone.com/yukihiro-matsumoto-interview

From another interview:

>The best thing we can do today to JavaScript is to retire it. Twenty years ago, I was one of the few advocates for JavaScript. Its cobbling together of nested functions and dynamic objects was brilliant. I spent a decade trying to correct its flaws. I had a minor success with ES5. But since then, there has been strong interest in further bloating the language instead of making it better. So JavaScript, like the other dinosaur languages, has become a barrier to progress. We should be focused on the next language, which should look more like E than like JavaScript.

- https://evrone.com/douglas-crockford-interview

One of the traits that makes Douglas great is being willing to say the obvious even if it is politically unpopular.

That jives with this article I found:

https://evrone.com/rob-pike-interview

> Rob: Although it's far from certain, after over a decade of work it looks like a design for parametric polymorphism, what is colloquially but misleadingly called generics, is coming in the next year or two. It was a very hard problem to find a design that works within the existing language and feels as if it belongs, but Ian Taylor invested a phenomenal amount of energy into the problem and it looks like the answer is now in reach.

Sounds like he took a welcomed step back. Hopefully the new leaders can deliver.