Ode to the Command Line
Linked by David Adams on Fri 5th Aug 2011 16:08 UTC
Graphics, User Interfaces A couple of days ago I read a blog post by Stephen Ramsay, a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a Fellow at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. In it, he mentions that he has all but abandoned the GUI and finds the command line to be "faster, easier to understand, easier to integrate, more scalable, more portable, more sustainable, more consistent, and many, many times more flexible than even the most well-thought-out graphical apps." I found this very thought-provoking, because, like Ramsay, I spend a lot of time thinking about "The Future of Computing," and I think that the CLI, an interface from the past, might have a place in the interface of the future.
E-mail Print r 7   · Read More · 58 Comment(s) http://osne.ws/jbf
Thread beginning with comment 484283
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
RE[3]: Powershell vs Bash
by benjymouse on Tue 9th Aug 2011 20:08 UTC in reply to "RE[2]: Powershell vs Bash"
benjymouse
Member since:
2011-08-06

now, the simple text streams don't eat much memory, makes interrupting things when you find what you need etc.

Like looking in some database thing and grep out of it. It's faster with bash, because it uses small pipes instead of buffering the whole stuff, even if the text is already there.It will presented at the end.


Ahem! PowerShell objects are *streamed* as well; they are pushed through the pipeline one-by-one. Because it is all in-process what is pushed through the pipeline is actually only an in-memory pointer. That is arguably both *faster* and more memory-efficient than constantly serializing to/from strings.

I don't know where you have gotten the idea that PowerShell would buffer everything until the end?

The biggest drawback is that large datasets will eat up all memory.

Once an object has been passed on through the pipeline it is eligible for garbage collection. Large datasets will not need to be allocated all at once.


Powershell in it's best for is a small subset of what scripting can do under unix type of operating systems.

PowerShell is much more capable than unix/linux *sh style shell scripting, more consistent, more robust and more secure.

Reply Parent Score: 1