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When the Monad shell was announced (back in the days when Longhorn was going to have a database filesystem, uber-cool widgets, and unicorns that puked rainbows)
by rcoder 18y ago
When the Monad shell was announced (back in the days when Longhorn was going to have a database filesystem, uber-cool widgets, and unicorns that puked rainbows), I actually found myself seriously considering installing Windows on a machine again just to play with it. The idea of a command shell that could be extended in any CLR-hosted language, with pipes that supported structured objects, not just text streams, was pretty damn exciting.
Then MS delayed it, split Monad (renamed PowerShell) from the OS-that-is-now-Vista, and sat on the technology for a few more years before quietly launching it as an Exchange Server admin tool. Meanwhile, I found myself using IRb and IPython more and more, and never really got around to setting up that Windows box.
- arockwell 18y agoI completely agree. I thought that MS stripped every cool feature from Longhorn except for Aero.
- ivank 18y agoThe CLI is more than just the shell's capabilities. Microsoft expected people to use PowerShell with the same horrible cmd.exe, and ignore the multi-second startup times.
- iigs 18y agoIt's just as well. Monad appears to suffer from severe second system effect ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect ). The early demos I saw had hopelessly long names, verbose syntax, and attempted to coalesce data into xml. While xml seems like a more flexible target than plain text, the net result was that it took a foreign set of tools to manipulate xml from one command's output to what the next command wanted. In the spirit of "Get off of my lawn!": I wish that .vbs had been cultivated into a usable environment for interacting with the computer instead of left to be identified with malware. The language is/was certainly more appropriately sized for typical system automation tasks.