PowerShell also runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux. You pass objects instead of plaintext through the pipeline which provides a rich experience. The full .NET type and ecosystem are also available when you really need a full fledged class for a thing.
murex also passes objects. The difference is the objects are passed as UNIX byte streams but with an additional data-type meta field. So processes written in murex can have PowerShell-like objects but at the same time standard POSIX utilities can still be added to the pipeline with no additional effort.
That latter point is, in my opinion, the biggest hurdle to using PowerShell.
Of course, it ultimately boils down to personal preference and for some, .NET support is a killer feature.
The cross-platform pwsh is actually what inspired me to go on the hunt, and was the first thing I tried. But while it’s good on Windows, using it on POSIX just felt… wrong, somehow. I later discovered uutils/coreutils (a Rust reimplementation of GNU coreutils that works on Windows) and decided it’s easier to bring my POSIX workflow to Windows than the other way around.
WSL on Windows replaces the need for uutils/coreutils. Running an actual distribution of Linux on Windows with WSL provides an actual Linux/POSIX environment.
In my experience, there is a graveyard of tools that I tried which attempted to create native POSIX ports for Windows. Each port came up short in my workflow every time. PowerShell and WSL provide me and the teams I work with an experience that simply works.
The magic thing that powershell has is that its objects are full .net objects so you can do method calls etc and not just structured data, so you can do stuff like
Get-Foo | % { $_.bar() }
Which is roughly equivalent to e.g. python
map(lambda x: x.bar(), getFoo())
Does murex have anything like that? Generally serializing objects (with methods) is to byte streams is not trivial nor without tradeoffs
Not directly but you can execute code dynamically. eg
Get-Foo | [ bar ] | source
would be the equivalent murex code.
PowerShell is definitely more sophisticated here because .bar is recognised as a method. Whereas in murex it's just a text field that you're asking the interpreter to execute as code.
murex breaks POSIX compliance massively because it acts as a proxy between each command in the pipeline. This means it can forward type information to processes within murex (eg builtins) but read and write byte streams to external commands.
As mentioned to one of your other replies, this causes a few issues (eg forking). But processes are still run in parallel like with a traditional shell and 99% of time this massive cheat is transparent to both the running processes and the users too.
This cheat does allow for some additional features though, like
- colourisation of STDERR (so it stands out)
- STDERR byte count used to judge if a process has failed
(possibly a few others I've forgotten but have to dash now for a lockdown Zoom party....sorry)
PowerShell maps plaintext to objects without issue. No need to drop down into bytestreams.
In the following example, 'choco' (Chocolatey) outputs a list of outdated packages in a consistent format (--limit-output). The text output is piped to the ConvertFrom-CSV PowerShell CmdLet, which maps the text output from choco into a PowerShell object.
PowerShell is also unnecessarily verbose for me and wasn't even available on non-Windows systems until midway through murex's life.
Plus it's easy to cherry pick specific features between different solutions and argue they're equivalent if you're going to ignore all the other aspects where they differ. For example a big part of murex is the REPL environment:
- murex parses man pages for smarter auto-competions
- murex integrates well with `tmux` for those who want a richer tiled TUI
- murex supports vim keys
- murex give context sensitive hints upon every keystroke
- murex has an events system baked in. So you can assign your own shortcut keys or run scripts upon filesystem changes
- murex supports regex searches through auto-completions. Which makes navigating directories quicker. It makes finding application names in `kill` quicker. etc
I'm not saying any of this to be critical against PowerShell - it's a sophisticated piece of engineering and a great solution for a great many people. But the differences between what I've built and PS are far greater than the properties they share.
POSIX commands are available on *nix platforms and PowerShell provides native functions or POSIX wrappers for most tasks. About the biggest issue is speed, but there's always POSIX or .NET Core in the rare instance tons of performance is required.
If I may, PS is a first-class citizen on Linux, macOS, and Windows. PowerShell is a spectacular cross-platform shell that provides an object oriented paradigm and it's available today.
PowerShell runs on Linux. I run PS as my primary shell [0] on Linux today. It's is open source too.
You're not far away with how PowerShell can parse Linux commands. Instead of relying on awk/grep, PowerShell uses .NET under the hood to provide consistency across operating systems. There are a few methods for converting from a Linux command to PowerShell objects based on delimiters or OFS. If you're interested, Steve Lee wrote a blog post that does a good job covering how to parse Linux command output into PowerShell objects [1].
I think it speaks volumes that the very people responsible for this positive change were themselves victims of near extinction due to consumption and greed.
The only real hope the worlds ecosystems have is drastic and sudden reduction in human population, which won't be pleasant for anyone.
This was proved by the resurgence of nature in the areas surrounding Chernobyl. I've been a part of a coral conservation project in SEAsia for the last 15 years, and we have seen more recovery over the last year due to tourists being gone than ever before.
Unfortunately the boat captains who were ferrying snorkelers before have gone back to fishing the reefs, so that change was short lived. We are also beginning to see signs of a major bleaching event.
The long term impacts of COVID are going to see a relaxation of ecological protections worldwide, which I imagine will have a similar effect.
Small trucks may cut enough emissions by reducing road-wear. If everyone switched from large trucks to an even larger amount of small trucks it's possible the problem is made worse.
Why the focus on small trucks as if they're a panacea?
>If everyone switched from large trucks to an even larger amount of small trucks it's possible the problem is made worse.
Right, but isn't the whole premise that the damage is the truck's weight cubed (or ^4)? Splitting large trucks to small trucks only increase wear linearly.
>Why the focus on small trucks as if they're a panacea?
I am interested in using Joplin exclusively and use both apps currently. The Standard Notes development team is nice but refactors happen too frequently and estimates are rarely (never) produced, even though the product is paid Open Source.
It's a pity because Joplin has pretty much the perfect feature set for me. I can't tell you much about the sync issue I had as I didn't find a solution (I also didn't spend too much time on it). Btw. I initially migrated from zim and the migration was super easy!!! What I can tell you is that Joplin suddenly didn't show any notes anymore because of a sync issue. In the source folder I saw some files still there but the notes of the previous week were all gone. I would have appreciated to have the option to tell Joplin that I don't care about sync and want my local Joplin files to be the primary ones - or something like that.
I then bought a 5 year plan of Standard notes which is not as user friendly as Joplin (in my opinion) but has some cool features (like the spreadsheet extension which is awesome). However, as mentioned, without being able to just paste images it's more or less useless for preparing blog posts or something like that. You need to use "fileSafe" I guess but for this you need Dropbox etc.. Other features missing in Standard Notes are simple drag & drop of folders and context menu...
Synchronization in Joplin concerned me too. E2EE is non-trivial to setup and Joplin will upload decrypted files if E2EE is misconfigured on a device. Encryption appears to be an afterthought in Joplin.
Standard Notes looks snazzy but too many features fail to work. I cannot get paste to work consistently on my mobile devices, and you're right - the editors are a an absolute mess. File Safe is only supported in unsupported editors and the supported editors lack basic features. FYI, the spreadsheet editor unsupported and exporting sheet data is...difficult.
I do not recommend Standard Notes anymore. Thanks for pointing out a need for external backups in Joplin though!
Ando Ngo has frequently posted information to intentionally muddy the situation and incite an anger against protestors. As a Seattle resident, my fear is that people are beginning to act on this disinformation from Andy Ngo and others.
Here, a multi-racial family was menaced by residents of Forks, WA. Residents actually cut down trees to block the road.
DynamoDB is consistent and scalable, not fast and cheap.
DDB is great for storing data that is required to be scalable and never needs to be joined. Add in DAX, developer time necessary to orchestrate transactions, calculate the scaling costs and...that's how AWS gets you.
Plus, local development requires half-complete emulators or a hosted database you're charged for.
No, maybe people should think twice about DynanoDB.
The artists criticizing Mr. Musk make a good point about what's really happening.
https://youtu.be/i9qWYUH5x3k