From: Marc Heiler <shevegen@...>
Date: 2007-12-04T22:38:41+09:00
Subject: Re: irb and unix shells

> One can throw just about any language to it.

I think that is a bit too short-sighted in the long run.
I don't know how you feel about it, but to me ruby evolves
around 100x faster than i.e. bash. And this includes new
ideas too. ;-)

Most scripts used on a *nix system will be shell scripts, i.e.
bootup scripts for example, and IMHO ruby beats shell scripts
with ease in pretty every regard (if you are able to use ruby
on your system that is).
Making a shell more a ruby-shell, also making it a practical
shell is a big advantage: You no longer have to care about
bash being the first-class citizen on your system, and then
throwing second class languages at it, you simply have your
many .rb files (many classes, many objects on your system)
and connect them together with that ruby-shell environment
being the first class citizen.
I think this is a nicer approach, and it's just a matter
of time until that all comes together in a practical
manner :)
rubyunix.rubyforge.org is a first nice step, let's see.

However, that being said (and since ruby+irb work on windows
as well), I agree with your remark about Windows.

(As a sidenote, the original, ancient rush was in part inspired
about the old monad shell on Windows presentation, which
showcased filtering on a dataset, and finally piping it into
some excel application which depicted a nice little graph. )


> The command shell in windows is terrible; heck, i cannot even do a
> ctrl-pgup - grr!@#$

Yeah it is ... some tools that can be usable on windows are
Mingw/MSys, Readline for windows, and Rlwrap. And of course ruby's
irb is not that bad either :-) in general Windows can be
quite usable once you use loads of open sourced stuff on
it and stand away from the other cr** IMHO ;-)
What did Larry say about perl? Use it's strength, not it's
weakness. I guess for windows the same accounts... avoid
its many pitfalls! ;-)
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