Comment by Siyo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Siyo | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

"Goto is all you need, no ifs or loops or dynamic dispatch, just jumps. I have no problem with this, I enjoy it like this, we don't need an improvement. There I said it, any downvotes will be worth it, because I get to voice my opinion. In the end I will still be happily using my assembler and enjoy my life."

I'm sorry, I couldn't help myself. Your comment reminds me of an anecdote I heard from the early times of structured programming. When structured programming was just gaining its feet, there was a certain class of programmers who just could not understand why people would want to write structured code. You can do everything in assembly they said, you have much more control over performance, etc. They looked down on structured programming as not "real programming".

There's a lot of benefits to adding some structure to text. I don't think that Nushell's approach is the best one, but to say that there are no problems and we shouldn't look to improve things is just backwards. We should always look to improve our tools and our craft, otherwise we would still be stuck writing assembly.

There's a lot of benefits to adding some structure to text.

There are benefits, true, but there are also potentially serious drawbacks. Chief among them, I would hazard, is the risk that we get locked into a format that didn't anticipate a (completely unknown) future need and we have to go back and rewrite everything again.

The beauty of text's lack of structure is that people are free to interpret it any way they please.

I keep seeing comments like this one, but just as you can parse textual data into something more structured, like the examples in the post, you can also print the structured data as text. So the tools that use and generate structured data are no less compatible because it's easy to go back and forth between the formats at will. You're not losing anything with this approach.

> You're not losing anything with this approach.

True, but you are adding something. And if you add things you don't really need, it becomes plain old cruft.

Like the others above, I understand the urge to make some things simpler by adding complexity, but for the long haul I'm convinced it's better to keep tools simple and add any needed complexity to the code you're writing (whether it's shell scripts or anything else). And then document the complexity so future you or some poor stranger can understand why the hell you did that in the first place.

But I don't look forward to reading comments like "X was deprecated so we're converting these tables back to text streams so they can be converted back to Y properly."

But isn't that precisely the problem? A lot of people are unsatisfied with the current solution which doesn't lend itself to a particular goal?

Aren't we now locked into a format (plain text) which is now becoming more and more of a pain (what type is this? is this text related to this other text?) and we're now having to go back to old utilities and add --json?

I get it, but to clarify, and maybe it's to do with the work I do, I have no problem with current shells, I think they are great. As I learn more about them and use different features I like them more. This is my experience.

Maybe you're just not very imaginative. I can see my workflow improve considerably by using a structured-io shell, and I'm already quite proficient in bash. So, I'm very happy some people are trying to make it happen.

Also, I'm not sure what your argument is, except "I don't get it"? It's fine, lots of people don't get stuff. Just move on, and maybe in a few years when it's mature, you'll see it again and go "Ah!"

Also goto being considered bad is already a very old idea. Yet it is still used, sparingly in the right places. Shell underpins a lot of stuff, it is tried and tested. Text is already structured, or can be, IFS, new lines, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com