On 7/31/23 15:07, Chet Ramey wrote:
On 7/31/23 7:38 AM, Denys Vlasenko wrote:
In the spirit of increased compatibility across Unix world, it'd be
quite useful if shells stop inventing incompatible "extensions".
That's an excellent way to stifle innovation.
There is no reason to innovate in tools such as sed, awk, or sh.
They have fossilized. Use them when adequate, use something newer
when they can't do what you need.
For example, you can add floating-point math to sh. This would be innovation.
This would also break many thousands of existing scripts,
while being nowhere near enough for most serious uses
of floating point calculations, both in speed and features.
Not a good idea.
This happens time and again. A tool gets developed, then (if it's good)
gains widespread acceptance, but then it becomes tied by the compatibility
of the large installed base.
Another example: IRC.
Compare it to a browser-based chat website, (slack, googlechat, etc).
Imagine what would it take to improve IRC to be on par with the latter:
* audio/videoconferencing
* user profiles with pictures, time zones, snoozing, etc
* file store
* on-server search
* calendar
* etc
It would be a slow-motion nightmare to do so without breaking compatibility
with old IRC clients. The technology is just outdated. What it needs to do now
is not so much innovating, but continue to serve well the use cases
of the existing user base.
