vedantroy

Does anyone know why Bash has low usability?

It seems like Bash has tons of footguns and unintuitive syntax. Is this just because the language grew organically?

That last statement was very bold. Do you think there is a direct link between open-sourcing this library and increased telemetry? What about VSCode and increased telemetry?

"It's common among people who think Javascript is a serious language".

I can't tell if you think JS is not a serious programming language.

I don't understand the desire for terse code, it makes things harder to read.

I also think Typescript makes the right tradeoffs, yes it may not have a Haskell-level type system, but in return, it has amazing integration with JS code and existing libraries, and no runtime.

As a side note, coming from someone whose previous exposure to type systems was Java and Kotlin, Typescript seems to have a pretty powerful type system. Yes, it may not have some/many Haskell-level features but I question whether those would have been necessary in the first place. At some point a more rigorous type system must stop generating value, otherwise we would all be using coq.

I think the larger issue is that shell scripts are intrinsically bad for writing readable code.

Consider the "cut" line in the shell script vs the "map" line in the JS script. The map line is easy to understand because it uses a chain of simple functions (map, split, array access, and lastly trim). The "cut" line has to cram all of this functionality into a few command line arguments instead of composing basic building blocks together.

I mean look at this: What does "only delimited" mean, what does "fields" mean, I might just be an illiterate boor but I don't remember what delimiter means off the top of my head (something like seperator, I assume).

cut --only-delimited --fields 2 --delimiter '|'

The JavaScript version is easier to read because it uses fundamental building blocks in the language that are

1. Super intuitive. (Split seems pretty easy to understand, especially when you know the input is a string, similarly everyone knows [1] means array access).

2. Widespread. You have probably encountered all of those JS functions before, I'd say the chance of encountering the "cut" utility is a bit less.

Summary: Shell just fundamentally sucks because it outsources a lot of functionality to various executables, each which have their own command line arguments. The ideal method is to use a programming language with consistent, composable, building blocks.

I am not a rust expert, but I assume the recent many programming languages have a keyword for function declaration is so that functions can be first class objects.

Sometimes I feel like I'm forced to take verbatim notes on my computer, even though I know that's bad for my learning.

Specifically, I'm reading a very detailed textbook on databases. I feel that if I don't take notes I will forget most of the content in the textbook because the textbook is so information dense, but at the same time, whenever I take notes they end up being word-for-word copies of the text because the textbook is already so concise/word-efficient.

Most of the time, I don't see an issue with non-native looking UIs. Oftentimes, non-native UIs look better.

VSCode and Atom both look great and they're non-native. I also think Slack looks pretty good too. Except for MacOS, native UI widgets generally seem to be pretty ugly.

Even Microsoft is embracing non-native UI for its own Microsoft Office platform.

Web-apps/material design, look sexy.

Out of curiosity, why doesn't the stack layout use flexbox? It seems like flexbox is the perfect fit for such a layout.