Telling a Computer to Do Things

That philosophical point about what it even means to "tell a computer to do things" is a good one. Sure, clicking around in a GUI is also telling the computer what to do. But there's a huge difference between using someone else's abstraction and building your own from scratch. The article is about that second part - the ability to throw stuff together however you want. With a GUI, you're stuck with whatever the designer thought of. With a shell, you can build just about anything

I was sure this article would be about how we tell computers to do things now (writing prompts to an AI in plain English). I was wrong. Interesting nonetheless.

On the higher level question in the article of why do people not use their main languages for basic file and command management?

I believe the answer is the same as to why Python remains hugely popular despite all the well-documented shortcomings: batteries included.

Shell languages include so many neat and concise ways to execute commands, deal with their input, output and exit codes, allow simple traversal of deep directory structures with globs and advanced tools like 'find' or 'xargs', that everything else is very unergonomic.

And niche by default (until it gets used widely enough), so even your LANG-OF-CHOICE-expert you recruit, they will not know a thing about that shell-focused library in LANG-OF-CHOICE.

TIL that the duckdb REPL supports reading json files (https://duckdb.org/docs/current/data/json/overview). This might actually be useful the next time I need to investigate a massive json file (`jq` can only go so far).

I was pretty close in guessing what they believe was "wrong" (or really, superfluous) with their initial shell script example.

I'd even drop the "if" from their footnote version, and go with simply

  npm install || (echo "boom" && exit)

(Not exactly equivalent because there won't be an "exit" if echo fails, but it's my preferred instict over ";") Also, "(" starts a subshell, if we are being pedantic.

Good advice. I've gotten a ton of utility out of my shell without learning very many tools particularly well.

If you take nothing else away from this, memorize the syntax of one-liner for loops, it has saved me so many times.

Nice article about actually learning stuff and putting this knowledge to use together. Not with AI but with one’s own brain.

Why are we assuming using the terminal is the only way of "telling a computer to do things"? Every way you interact with a machine, you are telling it to do things in theory.

For example

> At a fundamental level, I wasn’t able to tell my computer to accomplish anything that involved logic or stitching together multiple programs

How can that be true if you are telling it to boot on into a os? It doesn't involve logic? Or stiching together multiple programs?

Using a shell =\= telling a machine what to do on a broad level. You are just using the abstractions provided by the os. If you mean get better at shell so you can use it more efficiently than okay cool but that doesn't someone who uses a GUI doesn't "tell" the machine what to do as much as you.

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