I just wonder if M$ will keep all their arcane dos commands, you know how
annoying it is to move form a *nix to windows platform and have all the
goofy commands not work. You know how many times I have typed ls -l, in
dos just to remember its dir instead.
Who cares? The DOS batch language is one of the few programming languages
in use that's actually worse than Bash. I'm sure MS will either maintain
backwards compatibility or keep the DOS interpreter around. MS gets
routinely assaulted for its supposed neglect of backwards compatibility,
but all I can say is it's pretty hard to do worse than the fragmentation
under Unix, with a half dozen or more shells, all incompatible, and
all equally bad.
Man maybe you need some medical counseling, if you hate shells that
much, how did you put up with Windows for this long, especially Windows
98?
I've always found DOS close to unusable, so I just use a cygwin bash
shell or something else. Bash is bad, but it's usable, just barely,
to do simple things.
I dread to ask the question, of what specifically do you hate about the
bash shell, I find it well documented as well as any GNU software, just
go to gnu.org read up on it. I know that some people just hate CLI, but
then again I don't have a problem with it, but then again I think using
emacs, and vim are pretty cool, I don't know what I would do without
xterm.
As the old joke goes what is Xwindows used for? It used to switch
between xterms! That kind of sums up what kind of a user I am, I love
pipes, find, and grep if M$ has a decent implementation of that then it
might be useful.
The problem with Unix users is that they're almost all advocates, so
they're unable to view the technology critically. That's partly why
Unix systems have fallen so far behind in technology over the past 15
years or so, while competing systems continued to progress. I seem
to be one of the few Unix users who is willing to speak honestly about
the limitations and the great need for improvement.
There's a tiny minority of people who fall in love with typical Unix
technologies X Window, Emacs, and Bash, and are unable or unwilling to
see how much need they have for improvement. This rare kind of person
likes technology, likes being able to tweak their system, and likes being
able to do things in a quick and dirty way. But this kind of person
usually has little appreciation for theoretical issues, abstractions,
soundness, elegance, or even good programming practices.
If you want to understand what's wrong with Bash, all you need to do
is to compare it, with its brief, imprecise, and amateurish
man documentation, its murky semantics, its wacky syntax, its
spaghetti code implementation, with almost any other language in
existence. There is no evidence that the designers and maintainers of
Bash even know much of what's been learned about programming languages
in the past 30 or 40 years. Check out the documentation and specifications for
languages like Java, C#, OCaml, Haskell, Scheme, ..., even
something as purely commercial as Visual Basic, if you want to
see the contrast with more competent efforts. Also, you might want to
visit the scsh web site. Scsh is the only attempt at a shell I know
of by a competent computer scientist.
The other technologies you mention, like X Window, Emacs -- and I'd
add a number others to this list -- are all equally aimed at quick and
dirty use, but are very poorly designed, specified, documented, and
implemented.
