Re: who needs es..?

[haahr@kaleida.com (Paul Haahr)]

need is a strange word.  even i, who, until recently, used es
as my main interface to computers, would be hard pressed to say
i *needed* it.  these days, i don't even have a unix machine on
my desk at work, nor have i telneted to one.  (i do still use
one at home, but that's another story.)

we designed es as an experiment about how far we could usefully
to take a shell towards a ``real'' programming language.  does es
go too far in that direction?  maybe -- the comments about it
being too heavyweight or not having job control reinforce that
feeling -- but maybe not.

i've found es useful as my day to day shell.  i, too, have found
that i very rarely use features from es that are not in rc.  i pass
program fragments around (explicitly) much less than i thought i
would, but that mechanism is necessary for the piece of es that i
do use, its extensibility.

i think that there are many more interesting uses we can come up
with for this shell -- doing tasks that other shells haven't done,
or haven't done well, or needed source modification to do -- but
it's not clear to me that there aren't already tools that do those
jobs.  perl and emacs, whatever you may say against them, do a lot
on modern unix systems -- in many cases better than es could, given
its place in the system -- and have built up lots of momentum/inertia.

for the tasks that shells traditionally do, i would argue that es
is a significant improvement over sh- and csh-derived shells.  on
the other hand, so is rc, and it's not clear to me if i didn't want
to use es's extensibility, why i would use es and not rc today.
not everybody is so interested in the spoofing, so using rc -- smaller,
faster -- makes a lot of sense.

anyway, es development has not stopped, although it has slowed with
both Byron and me in startup mode now.  i do hope to get out this
mythical 0.88/0.9 release soon, and, when all the changes have
stabilized, a 1.0 version.  at that point, new work on es will probably
stop for a while, much as rc has been stable for a long time.

paul