From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2018 17:06:59 -0700 Subject: [COFF] Other OSes? In-Reply-To: <20180705231205.14944156E400@mail.bitblocks.com> References: <82df833ae2a587b386b4154fc6051356a3510b19@webmail.yaccman.com> <20180705231205.14944156E400@mail.bitblocks.com> Message-ID: <20180706000659.GD18361@mcvoy.com> On Thu, Jul 05, 2018 at 04:11:57PM -0700, Bakul Shah wrote: > On Thu, 05 Jul 2018 13:49:58 -0700 "Steve Johnson" 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.