On 10 Nov 2018, at 11:01, Andre Alves Garzia via use-livecode
<use-livecode@lists.runrev.com> wrote:
Bob,
I am hijacking this thread to express some personal opinions about the
terminal, it is not related to the topic of the original message but a
different perspective on the subject you brought up on your reply.
When I first for my mac (A G3 running Mac OS 8.x) and started developing for it, my first
thought was: "Where is the terminal?!", the lack of terminal was one of the
main reason I struggled with development in the mac for some time because, IMHO there is
a beauty to terminal tools that is no longer available to the current incarnation of
macOS (but was present in earlier versions, more about it later).
The main advantage for terminal tools is composability, which is at the heart of the UNIX philosophy and remember (the current) "macOS
is UNIX". Having little tools that compose with one another to execute whatever workflow you need. You generate certificates with one
tool, you sign binaries with another, you pipe the result of one command into the other and with some clever scripting you automate your
whole flow. The power of UNIX is this toolbox of little tools and the scripting that goes on top of them to compose them into pieces more
powerful and featureful than each individual component. Thats why in the terminal you can use a single line to post something to a web API
server, get a response, decode it, parse its JSON reply, reason about it and extract data, just by piping from "curl" to
"jq" to "awk" or "grep" or "wc" or whatever you need.
GUI tools don't compose. You need to ship new tools to add more features or you
need to update the current ones. Doing web stuff on classic MacOS was tricky as
I couldn't rely on my usual toolset of little UNIX gizmos (I learned about MPW
and other stuff later).
The solution to make GUI tools composable is AppleScript of course, and I know
many who are reading this email thought about that when reading the second
paragraph. With AppleScript we could have all the convenience of GUI, the kind
of easy and amazing UX that Bob was talking about, and yet be composable thus
making each GUI tool more capable than its features alone. And for a while,
this was fantastic but AppleScript is no longer in favor at Apple and most
Third-Party developers seem to have forgotten it. Each power-user oriented app
that allows scripting appears to be shipping a different solution, so the dream
of AppleScript is lost, it was also never cross-platform, but the little rusty
UNIX toolkit still works, almost 60 years later, and it is cross-platform-ish.
So the Terminal allows Apple and others to reuse good tools from GNU, *BSD and
others and build the workflow they need.
Little terminal tools are the only way to automation these days, all the other
solutions require more buy-in from 3rd party developers or reinventing the
wheel. Thats why it pays of to learn just a bit of terminal stuff, so that you
too can build those little composable things, so that you too can benefit from
60 years of little tools that do the job.
Still, I miss AppleScript, and Frontier, and DreamCard, and MacOS Classic...
Om om
andre
PS: I am no longer a Apple user, so if by any chance AppleScript is back, I am
not aware of it, sorry.
On 11/9/2018 10:49 PM, Bob Sneidar via use-livecode wrote:
It's funny you should say that. Long ago when the first Apple MacIntoshes came
out, I fell in love with the GUI simply because I could use a computer without
having to type in commands. For years, I would not even work with a PC, because
all their was to work with was DOS, and even when Windows came out, it was
really DOS pretending to be a GUI.
Later, when I went from being a hobbyist to doing real IT for a living, I was soooo
exasperated with PCs because reformatting a hard drive was an evening's work, especially
if the manufacturer wasn't real clear about how many sectors, blocks, etc in the sticker
on the drive! But I always had Macs to look to, where I could say, "See? NO COMMAND
LINE! THAT's how to do computing nowadays!"
Now, even with all the advances Microsoft has made in their OS, some things can *only* be
done from a command line, and I think this is just laziness on the part of developers.
Apple seems to have fallen in to this developer malaise, where it's easier to just write
some terminal code and tell people, "Just type this command..."
People cannot remember commands, especially not terminal commands, with all the arguments
and caveats and different ways to put it all together. Apple used to be, "The
computer for the rest of us." Now it's just another computer.
Bob S
On Nov 9, 2018, at 14:27 , Rick Harrison via use-livecode
<use-livecode@lists.runrev.com> wrote:
Hi Kee,
Thanks for that. Although I’ve been down that
lane for sometime now. Why Apple keeps
making things worse and worse instead of
the other way around I don’t know.
In principle, I believe that no LiveCoder should
ever have to be subjected to using the Terminal.
Ideally we should have a stack that pulls everything
together for our LiveCode users so they don’t have
to even touch it.
I will let you know what I find out if anything.
Rick
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