Yes Oil is the only shell that's a graceful upgrade from POSIX sh and bash :) If it were done the other way around, that would have been impossible.
As long as the implementation makes enough progress, I have no doubt it will pay off. I think this is "obvious" if you look at the history of technology, but I guess I have to publish this blog post draft called Don't Break X (Why Oil is a Long-Winded Project)
- Don't break the Linux kernel interface. https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/235335/why-is-there... (there is probably a better link for this one; there's one with a lot of profanity and insults from Linus Torvalds that I'm not sure I want to use)
Similarly, Oil doesn't break shell, and we definitely need a shell like that.
Other alternative, incompatible shells are valuable, but there's absolutely no question that there needs to be a compatible upgrade. Just like C++ has made huge leaps while Rust was being developed. (Crucially, Oil is different than C++ as it actually deprecates some legacy with parsing and runtime options.)
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There's a distortion where all the people interested in Oil now are by definition interested in new stuff. That is, in reality 95% of people are more interested in OSH than Oil, because they don't care about new languages and they just want things to work. But the people I hear from are the 5% who care about new stuff. (which is good, but it's not representative).
A similar distortion is that there are probably 10x to 50x more people working on C++ than Rust (e.g. at least 10,000 people at Google alone; I'd surprised if more than 100 or 1000 do any Rust for work. Also consider older companies like Oracle.). But if you were to go by this corner of the Internet, you might think Rust is the more popular language.
In reality C++ is the far bigger and more capable ecosystem, if you care about robotics, embedded, AI, GPU, native desktop apps, information retrieval and data structures, etc.
It's mostly useful as a dev tool right now. I would also note that probably 90% of bash users don't do any bash programming. As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, Oil is very much focused on the programming part.
It has a better foundation for an interactive shell than bash, but somebody else needs to push on that part via the "headless shell".
As long as the implementation makes enough progress, I have no doubt it will pay off. I think this is "obvious" if you look at the history of technology, but I guess I have to publish this blog post draft called Don't Break X (Why Oil is a Long-Winded Project)
- Don't Break Windows apps. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
- Don't break JavaScript and the web. From HOPL IV. https://hopl4.sigplan.org/details/hopl-4-papers/10/JavaScrip... . Wirfs-Brock and Brendan Eich discuss whether the JS standards committee did the WRONG THING for 10 years.
- Don't break the Linux kernel interface. https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/235335/why-is-there... (there is probably a better link for this one; there's one with a lot of profanity and insults from Linus Torvalds that I'm not sure I want to use)
Similarly, Oil doesn't break shell, and we definitely need a shell like that.
Other alternative, incompatible shells are valuable, but there's absolutely no question that there needs to be a compatible upgrade. Just like C++ has made huge leaps while Rust was being developed. (Crucially, Oil is different than C++ as it actually deprecates some legacy with parsing and runtime options.)
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There's a distortion where all the people interested in Oil now are by definition interested in new stuff. That is, in reality 95% of people are more interested in OSH than Oil, because they don't care about new languages and they just want things to work. But the people I hear from are the 5% who care about new stuff. (which is good, but it's not representative).
A similar distortion is that there are probably 10x to 50x more people working on C++ than Rust (e.g. at least 10,000 people at Google alone; I'd surprised if more than 100 or 1000 do any Rust for work. Also consider older companies like Oracle.). But if you were to go by this corner of the Internet, you might think Rust is the more popular language.
In reality C++ is the far bigger and more capable ecosystem, if you care about robotics, embedded, AI, GPU, native desktop apps, information retrieval and data structures, etc.