[COFF] Other OSes?
Larry McVoy
lm at mcvoy.com
Fri Jul 6 10:06:59 AEST 2018
On Thu, Jul 05, 2018 at 04:11:57PM -0700, Bakul Shah wrote:
> On Thu, 05 Jul 2018 13:49:58 -0700 "Steve Johnson" <scj at yaccman.com> wrote:
> > That's an interesting topic, but it also gets my mind thinking about UNIX
> > features that were wonderful but didn't evolve as computers did.
> >
> > My two examples of this are editor scripts and shell scripts. In the day, I
> > would write at least one shell script and several editor scripts a day. Most
> > of them were 2-4 lines long and used once. But they allowed operations to be
> > done on multiple files quite quickly and safely.
> >
> > With the advent of glass teletypes, shell scripts simply evaporated -- there
> > was no equivalent. (yes, there were programs like sed, but it wasn't the
> > same...). Changing, e.g., a function name oin 10 files got a lot more tedious.
> >
> > With the advent of drag and drop and visual interfaces, shell scripts
> > evaporated as well. Once again, doing something on 10 files got harder than
> > before. I still use a lot of shell scripts, but mostly don't write them from
> > scratch any more.
>
> With specialized apps there is less need for the kind of
> things we used to do. While some of us want lego technic,
> most people simply want preconstructed toys to play with.
Years and years ago, decades ago, I worked on a time series picker that
had a pretty cool interface. Yeah, it was a GUI tool with all the menus,
etc, but it also had a console prompt because all the menus had keyboard
shortcuts. What was neat about it was that as you pulled down menus and
did stuff, which was a process where you'd go through several things to
get what you want, the console would fill in with the shortcuts.
So if you hadn't used it for a while, using it basically taught you the
shortcuts. It was pretty slick, I wish all guis worked like that.
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