Tuesday January 11th, 2021 NCLUG Meeting

[Sean Reifschneider]

There's also Elvish that does some similar sorts of structured data
handling: https://elv.sh/

Also nutshell: https://github.com/nushell/nushell

I haven't used any of them, powershell does seem compelling.

There is also some tool I ran into within the last 6 months, I can't at all
remember the name, but it provided all sorts of /proc-like things as
structured data.  I remember being impressed by it, for whatever it's worth
since I can't seem to find it, even after extensive searching.

On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 7:49 PM Bob Proulx <bob at proulx.com> wrote:

> > What: Tuesday January 11th, 2021 NCLUG Meeting
>
> We had a very small group.  There were five of us at the start and
> then six when a later member joined us.  So mostly we just had a round
> table discussion.  Which was not capturable.  But then Brother
> printers were mentioned and I grabbed the topic to talk about my
> latest "rage against the machine" printer driver problem.
>
> A person I am helping has a Brother HL3040CN printer.  Brother
> supports this with a printer driver for 32-bit Ubuntu 16.04 only.
> There is exactly one executable though and I don't see where it is
> ever called.  So other people have reported success by force
> installing it on newer 64-bit systems.  I am resisting doing that.  I
> might post more about this but discussing the problem just motivated
> me to think I will create a 32-bit Ubuntu 16.04 chroot and install it
> there to see what it does.
>
> Then there was a discussion of "rm -rf" problems.  People repeatedly
> have issues with removing too much.
>
> Anyway...  After a pretty fun random discussion of various things.
> Brian Sturgill gave a good talk about PowerShell.  Yes PowerShell.  It
> turns out that PowerShell is now released under a free software
> license.  You get full source.  You can compile it for your system
> from source.  Wow.
>
> Brian first started talking about soft points of traditional Unix
> shells.  Everything is a string.  No built in date handling for
> example.  Debugging of shell scripts can be an issue.  (I pointed out
> that there is a bash debugger available.  I don't use it myself but it
> looked interesting.)  And then mentioned Python doesn't solve these
> problems completely either.  Complained about the poor state of Python
> on Windows.
>
> Brian likes many things about PowerShell.  It has really good command
> line documentation.  In the PowerShell REPL it has dropdowns and
> completion.  TAB completion.  Lots of nice features.  PowerShell has a
> rich library of built in string manipulation actions.
>
> On Ubuntu/Mint/other install powershell as a snap package using the
> --classic option so that it has full file system permissions.  The new
> default is a read-only file system.  But for a programmable shell the
> entire purpose is to do things.
>
> Recommends it for cross platform operation between Windows and other
> environments.  Because PowerShell works not only on Windows but also
> is Free Software and available on BSD/GNU/Linux systems.
>
> In PowerShell many operations are builtins that return builtin first
> class objects.  For example in the shell one should never use ls
> programmatically to list directories but in PowerShell ls is a builtin
> that returns a first class internal object.  Which means that
> whitespace and metacharacters in file names are never a problem in
> PowerShell.
>
> Brians interpretation of the Unix command line is that it was written
> for the user.  Technical users certainly but still for the user.
> Whereas PowerShell was written for the developer.  Therefore it has
> very good C interoperability.  Shows some interactions between
> PowerShell and to kernel system calls.  There are wrappers for GTK for
> graphics programs.  "And then things get a little weird."  Demo of
> event driven callbacks for GTK button actions and such.
>
> The point was that PowerShell generically interacted with C / C#
> libraries allowing it to do, for example a graphical program even
> though PowerShell itself didn't know anything about GTK graphics.
> It's completely generic and dynamic.
>
> There were also other shells discussed.  Brian liked this site as an
> additional reference to good stuff too.
>
>     http://www.oilshell.org/
>
> Good meetup!
>
> Due to the high rate of COVID19 in the county we decided not to do our
> traditional after meeting dinner at a local restaurant.  We will check
> again next month.
>
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