The Dune Shell

https://adam-mcdaniel.github.io/dune-website/

by thunderbong • 2 years ago

240 82 2 years ago

adam-mcdaniel.github.io

I like the ideas of Dune and Nu, which I think were trailblazed by powershell to a degree. The problems of pure *NIX pipe philosophy with text as the lingua franca were persistent parsing problems and escaping. However, the problems of going to far in the way powershell went was it was too radical having to reimagine/replace/relearn almost everything, and generally more difficult to accomplish simple text manipulation. Nu at least maintains most of the *NIX shell UX. Maybe at some point in the future, we will reach parity to where there will fusion of the main DSLs, shells, and programming languages into a runtime interaction system that is somewhere between psql, Erlang shell, nu, and Squeak where there is programming language-OS parity obliterating the distinctions between programming languages, command shells, and DBMS shells. One can dream of a future where perhaps it will be possible to write a function, library, or program in any language one chooses and call it from any other shell or language without swig or ceremony.

wodenokoto• 2 years ago

too radical having to reimagine/replace/relearn almost everything

I switched to zsh because at the time I thought it had better autocomplete, but honestly I use it as I would bash. And I don't think it was worth it to change a little bit.

To change shell I think the change _should_ be radical.

idunnoman12222• 2 years ago

But it is bash…

abhinavk2• 2 years ago

Try fish or xonsh.

kitd• 2 years ago

A day or so there was this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41558081

Imagine your shell's model not being a command line console but a spreadsheet!

actionfromafar2• 2 years ago

Shades of Q, APL and other array languages, but visual by default. Maybe an APL spreadsheet-shell would fit the bill? :-D

ghayes• 2 years ago

I wonder if there's a good middle ground where unix commands could opt into a structured output, and until they exist, you could shim via `ls -la | shim "ls -la" |> ".modified_time"`. Then one day it could be `ls -la |> ".modified_time"` when structured data is supported natively by the program or command. I feel every project ends up dying since it needs to support every command all at once to be useful.

actionfromafar2• 2 years ago

To me the silly hang-up for PowerShell is none of that, but the strange syntax. I'd taken (even!) JavaScript-ish syntax over that.

packetlost5• 2 years ago

One can dream of a future where perhaps it will be possible to write a function, library, or program in any language one chooses and call it from any other shell or language without swig or ceremony

I mean, there's a reason text was selected, it's the lowest common denominator. What you're asking for is universal FFI, which we already have that for the most part: C. The problem ultimately turns into runtime and resource management issues when crossing language boundaries, that is, unless you use OS primatives (pipes, sockets, shared memory, processes, etc.) and use message passing/pipelines exclusively. Then we're back to plaintext.

There's a ton of non-printable characters in ASCII that are useful as delimiters for non-keyboard interactive programs that are largely vestigial. One could at least consider reusing them for delimiters and special control sequences for message passing, but without some sort of standardization it's limited in practical use.

Brian_K_White2• 2 years ago

The problem with those ascii values is editors don't display them and there are no keyboard keys to type them.

The reason csv exists is because you can actually see and type all parts of it, on anything, any platform, any hardware, any software, any age, even a mechanical typewriter, even a pencil. That is not merely nice, it's essntially priceless, infinitely, incalculably valuable. The utility outweighs the problems as big as they absolutely are. Actually the same is true for json, yaml, xml...

WorldMaker4• 2 years ago

Instead of inventing some new delimited formats, we also already have nearly ubiquitous interchange formats like JSON. If you wanted to reduce the in memory footprint versus plaintext encoding the JSON there are good options like BSON and CBOR.

superb_dev2• 2 years ago

Nitpick but I wouldn’t call C a universal FFI, it’s merely the de facto FFI. C can’t meaningfully represent any complex language semantics (not that it should or even could)

chrisweekly• 2 years ago

Interesting thought experiment. Reminds me of my cousin's project Xonsh https://xon.sh/

BeetleB• 2 years ago

Happily been using xonsh for the last 6 years. Strongly recommend.

Brian_K_White2• 2 years ago

The problem of powershell is not merely thet it's new and different, and not merely that you have to learn a new and different way to get a given task done.

Powershell makes some things possible or easier that weren't possible or easy, but only at the expense of making other things either impossible or at least vastly less practical, and all in all it's a bad trade off and a wrong set of priorities for the job it claims to fill, or at least for the job bash currently fills. It's not that bash is a gold standard, just that it's not fundamentally wrong.

xelamonster2• 2 years ago

It's also just absurdly verbose for a language intended mainly for manual input. I get annoyed having to type out `sudo systemctl` multiple times in a row, in Powershell every single command is at minimum that long. Which makes it way more difficult to memorize the commands too.

TristanBall• 2 years ago

Curious as to what's "vastly less practical" in powershell?

hi-v-rocknroll2• 2 years ago

True. PS has platform-specific API hooks that are orthogonal to the capabilities of other shells, and more-less replaces JScript, VBScript, and .bat files.

Putting that stuff aside, it is/was one of the first command shells/REPLs outside of SQL DBMS ones in a long time to support manipulation of structured information. For a smoother transition, shells like nu that can straddle structured and file-/line-/word-oriented will be more successful than leaping to too radical of upheaval.

hnlmorg2• 2 years ago

There are shells out there that sit between PowerShell / Nu and the old guards like Bash / Zsh.

Ones that support data structures out-of-the-box (like any et al) but also work perfectly fine with existing UNIX commands (like Bash).

sea-gold• 2 years ago

Here is a nice list: https://github.com/oils-for-unix/oils/wiki/Alternative-Shell...

brazzledazzle3• 2 years ago

PowerShell seems to work fine calling a nix executable, unless I'm missing something:

ls -t *.js | head -n 10 | foreach { echo $_ ; Get-ChildItem $_ | fl Name, Length } product_original.js

Name : product_original.js Length : 3353

gulpfile.js

Name : gulpfile.js Length : 382

Aurelius108• 2 years ago

I was scripting on a windows machine which didn’t have WSL setup and decided to learn PowerShell. After a week or so of scripting with PowerShell and seeing how intuitive and robust the syntax is, something changed in my brain and I decided I never again wanted to deal with bash and its endless quirks and brittleness. It’s unnatural to have to wrap every variable access with “${}”, that unnatural key sequence always caused a break in my flow. Anyway I reach for Python sooner and really hunger for a clean, robust nix shell. I hope powershell has instilled this in many people and it drives adoption of something better

dgan2• 2 years ago

I have tried to do the same, but i have opposite experience. I just can't grok the syntax, it always seems like a magician pulling out another "Haha! I bet you haven't seen this one coming !"

Like, i can't even construct the abstract model of how it's supposed to work

solidsnack90003• 2 years ago

Maybe tabular data is a credible intermediate step. Many shell tools already export data in a tabular format.

082349872349872• 2 years ago

One can dream of a future where perhaps it will be possible to write a function, library, or program in any language one chooses and call it from any other shell or language without swig or ceremony.

Was that not VMS?

MrDrMcCoy3• 2 years ago

One can dream of a future where perhaps it will be possible to write a function, library, or program in any language one chooses and call it from any other shell or language without swig or ceremony.

That's a neat idea, and sounds like something that could be built on graalvm.

kseistrup• 2 years ago

Hm, even if I download the sample .dune-prelude, dunesh keeps asking me if this is my first time.

Also, can I make it use a 24h clock and non-US date formatting?

kickingvegas• 2 years ago

Obligatory mention of Emacs Eshell. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/eshell.h...

ssivark• 2 years ago

The advertisement promises a combination of bash and lisp. So it makes me wonder -- why couldn't we just use lisp?

What are the affordances needed for a "scripting" language (or for interactive use) vis-a-vis more "production use? Is it just about having minimal boilerplate, and a large corpus of ready-to-use functions in the namespace?

Kinrany2• 2 years ago

Process composition is one thing that shell languages do better than traditional programming languages

hnlmorg2• 2 years ago

There’s plenty of LISP packages that support process composition. Also LISPs syntax better suits write once type environments like REPL shells than your average C-derived syntax.

slowmovintarget• 2 years ago

https://github.com/babashka/babashka

Granted, if you're saying why can't we have the shell also... well, now you're talking about Emacs.

jimbokun• 2 years ago

Maybe the ultimate would be default to bash but if you start a command with a prefix everything following is parsed and evaluated as an s-expression.

toolslive• 2 years ago

ipython is the complete opposite: python but enhanced with bash. For example:

    x = !ls   # capture the output of `ls` into x
    x[0]      # the first filename  
    ...

jerf2• 2 years ago

"Is it just about having minimal boilerplate"

That's a lot of it, but I think people don't realize how every keystroke counts with shell.

There's only a handful of languages where the "apply function" operator is space. Shell is one of them. (Haskell & Forth are the other two I know off the top of my head, possibly Factor (concatenative in general tends this way).) Most new shells that are successful copy this. I don't think that's a coincidence. Lisp's abundance of parens is something that people will have trouble with, even Lisp programmers, because this is not the usual whining about a foreign language paradigm and not being used to reading parens... this is literally about the effort required to physically enter them with a keyboard.

tom_• 2 years ago

Regarding minimal syntax: https://yosefk.com/blog/i-cant-believe-im-praising-tcl.html

solidsnack90003• 2 years ago

In addition to "space is function application" another important shell affordance seems to be "words are just words" -- you don't have to quote simple strings like `README.md`. If you want a single string with more than one word (where there is a space in between), that is in conflict with "space is function application", so then you have to put it in quotes.

tempodox• 2 years ago

Nice, it even has Muad'Dib (the desert mouse from the “Dune” movies) as its mascot. The question “but does it have Muad'Dib?!” was the first thing I thought of when I saw the title.

beardedwizard• 2 years ago

More white rat than desert mouse, I was disappointed. The mouse is also featured in the source material - the books :)

globular-toast• 2 years ago

Also the one in the film looked more like a jerboa.

mmastrac• 2 years ago

I like the ideas behind Powershell, but the DX has always felt ugly and clunky compared to standard shell. Unix/Posix are full of great tools, but they are all extremely painful for newbies and take years to master. There's got to be a middle ground where we can have the power and approachability of SQL with the beautiful elegance of standard Unix pipes.

Dune seems to take a step in that direction which is great.

mattmight• 2 years ago

"Think of it as an unholy combination of bash and Lisp" reminded me of Scheme Shell: https://scsh.net/

My Ph.D. advisor Olin Shivers created this. It's more pulling bash into Lisp than Lisp into bash.

It doesn't seem to be maintained anymore, but some of its ideas live on in Racket.

michaelsbradley• 2 years ago

And now there’s Rash: The Reckless Racket Shell

http://rash-lang.org/

https://github.com/willghatch/racket-rash

nxobject• 2 years ago

I’ve always wanted to ask about the notorious introduction to scsh’s manual… [1] could Olin have been less than 100% satirical there?

[1] https://scsh.net/docu/html/man.html

esafak• 2 years ago

Looks like it needs some contributors; no releases in almost a year.

delichon• 2 years ago

The shell avatar is a rodent but not a desert mouse, not a muad'dib. It's "a shell by the beach", not inspired by any intellectual property you might be thinking of. Yet memorable. Well played.

CMCDragonkai• 2 years ago

It kind of sucks that the default shell language is so clunky on Linux O/Ses. Bash marginally better than POSIX sh, and Zsh marginally better.

pasc1878• 2 years ago

Even worse is that POSIX forces this to be used.

Using a non POSIX shell is much easier to write (e.g. fish xonsh - and possibly Powershell or rash but I have not used the last two)

sh and derivatives are difficult for me to follow the syntax is impenetrateable - and I was a professional APL programmer.

solidsnack90003• 2 years ago

The author writes:

With my last shell, Atom, I had accomplished some of the coziness that bash was missing, but I also introduced a lot of really fatal flaws in the syntax and the type system.

I would be interested to read more about this -- what the author learned from that experiment.

noisy_boy• 2 years ago

bash has its own issues but my main gripe is handling of arrays and dictionaries - the syntax is so awkward and hard to remember that I inevitably have to have a reference open in another window. I wish they added some syntactic sugar to make that more ergonomic while retaining backwards compatibility.

imp0cat• 2 years ago

This is where Copilot (or other similar tool) help a lot!

ulbu• 2 years ago

In the domain and history that shells inhabit, the design should not prioritize arithmetic operations over indirection. '>>' is a biiig footgun. Elevation of a symbol to non-destructive operation into a destructive one is obviously a wrong choice. I wonder if it was a deliberate decision.

edit: just leave '>>' as append and make '>>>' destructive instead.

olejorgenb• 2 years ago

I was thinking the same.

They should at least make it an option to prompt the user when interactively redirecting to an already existing file. ZSH has this, except for the prompt (you'll need to run the command again using `>!`)

The Dune Shell

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