[TUHS] [tuhs] The Unix shell: a 50-year view

[Chet Ramey]

On 7/2/21 5:24 PM, Nelson H. F. Beebe wrote:
> In this week's BSDNow.tv podcast, available at
> 
>          https://www.bsdnow.tv/409
> 
> there is a story about a new conference paper on the Unix shell.  The
> paper is available at
> 
> 	Unix shell programming: the next 50 years
> 	HotOS '21: Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems, Ann
> 	Arbor, Michigan, 1 June, 2021--3 June, 2021
> 	https://doi.org/10.1145/3458336.3465294
> 
> The tone is overall negative

Perhaps, though they do say

"The shell is a useful abstraction deserving of our attention despite its
imperfections (Section 2)."

and

"The Unix shell hits a sweet spot between succinctness, expressive power,
and performance."

I participated in the accompanying panel. Everyone seems to hate the
shell's quoting rules and word splitting, and those two things alone are
sufficient to give the shell a bad rap, yet one thing that became clear
is that people are trying to use the shell (or not) without understanding
the underlying Unix abstractions that we take for granted (such as the file
system). And what's worse: they don't want to and nobody is teaching them.

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
		 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet at case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/