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Comment by voaie | Hacker News Reader

> The problem with outdated shells looks pretty clear: they were made with one kind of tasks in mind but are used for other, bigger and more complex tasks. Such scripts usually look as a fight against the language and working around it much more than using it to solve the problem.

Mind you,

> Create a shell (in that language) that is up to date with today's tasks - cloud, remote execution on a group of hosts.

I'd rather create another DSL/tool to solve it.

> Two languages actually.

> Current-shells-like but simplified (called "commands"), $(...) syntax

> Scripting language, "normal" programming language (called "code"), {...} syntax

Good luck.

> The scripts that I've seen (and written in Python and Ruby) look too verbose and show unnecessary effort. Such scripts do not look an optimal solution (at the very least).

Did you check scsh? (I don't use it.) http://scsh.net/docu/html/man-Z-H-3.html

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The QNX shell could easily do remote execution. I worked at a company in the mid-90s (porting Unix software to QNX). My machine had a modem on it, and my boss (the owner of the company) would use it from his computer to dial out---all he had to do was reference the modem device on my computer at his command line.

In fact, you could run a program on a local machine referencing a file on a second machine, pipe the output to a program on a third machine and have that redirect the output to a file on a fourth machine, all from the command line. I don't recall the exact syntax, but it was something like:

    cat @2/path/to/large/file | @3/bin/grep 'foo' >@4/tmp/output

(Individual hosts were numbered on a QNX ethernet based network, but the default permmissions were Unix like). All of this was a consequence of the message-based QNX operating system (whether messages were delivered locally or remotely was invisible to programs) but I don't see why something like can't be done today.

This is a quite neat example, but it looks like the QNX shell mixed several concerns about how do you connect to these machines, how do you secure the communication, etc.

    $ ssh @2 "cat /path/to/large/file" | ssh @3 "/bin/grep 'foo'" | ssh @4 "cat >/tmp/output"

is rather clunky, but separates those concerns well.

Sorry about not getting back sooner (returning from vacation) but the QNX network message passing ran over Ethernet, not IP, so it only worked (to my knowledge) over a local segment. Given that it was transparent to user processes, it could be argued that security could be added at that layer (two of the seven layer OSI model).

I see now. The parenthesis don't feel like a convenient syntax.

Scheme could be a good language (for fans?) if it is not used interactively.

Scsh is a very powerful shell, that is based on Scheme 48 plus its own additions. It is important to note that it runs on x86_64 with the 0.7 release.

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