I wrote marcel. In my view, nushell and marcel are very similar. nushell has tabular output, which I haven't thought was all that useful.
Marcel is python-based. The nushell guys have had to invent a lot of language. By basing marcel on python, I don't have to invent language. Any logic to be added is expressed in python. E.g, do a recursive listing of files and find those that changed in the last 3 days:
ls -fr | select (f: now() - f.mtime() <= days(3))
The stuff inside the parens is a python function, applied to a File f, piped in from ls. (Marcel lets you omit "lambda".)
That said, every time I look into one of these shells, I end up sticking with bash. When it gets to the point that I need something more powerful than bash and the Unix command line environment, I'd just as soon write a stand-alone program which I can check into version control, use on remote systems that don't have one of these fancy shells installed, add proper tests, etc.
This is a neat project though. I'll keep an eye on it.
Yes, I know that, but it's also exceedingly rare for a filename to contain a newline and using -exec is extremely inefficient. I also wrote that on my iPad. Typically I'd use a combination of -print0 and xargs -0 for anything more formal than a one-liner on the command line.
The larger bug in my example is that it fails if any of the directories in the path contain a "." in their name!
Almost forgot: I also switch from bash to Python at a low threshold. In that case, I find Marcel’s API useful. I can then do shell-like piping inside of Python.
I actually agree with most of this. I tend to use Marcel for ETL sorts of processing, quick database access with data munging on either side, cluster access, etc. it works fine for basic shell usage though.
As for a more complex example: yes, the website has better examples, but they are also more involved to explain.
As someone who's leaned into Nushell deeply, I can tell you that the tabular and hierarchical data output is the major selling point of Nushell. For me and my team, who work with data and metadata constantly, it's an incredible productivity boost.
The major pains with Nushell are debugging pipelines that are too slow, having to learn the new language constructs, and process overhead for going in and out of Python for other pieces.
If you stick to marcel commands and python functions, then all the processing happens in a single Python process (with a small number of exceptions). Beside the process overhead, this approach also avoids serialization/deserialization costs, and even string copying costs. x | y | z just passes Python tuples from one command to another via function call.
Can you expand on your first point? Why are tabular and hierarchical output so important for your work?
Yep. It's a very clean, powerful and well thought out API. And I'm saying that coming from a place of love towards unix and its pipes. I'd almost argue it's better than the unix model. Almost.
Been able to give poweshell commands in FOIA litigation and its power is on full display with one liners where it's hard for a gov agency to say no to something so simple.
It was most notably helpful in litigation against the White House Office of Management and Budget. Was suing for one week of email metadata records (to, from, CC, bcc, time, date) in the last week of Jan 2017. They said that they had no way to complete the request. So we sent them multiple one liners that extracts the info from outlook 365, which pipes it to a csv export command. They told us that they didn't run that sort of command as a routine practice, but we found a separate lawsuit that found emails of the exact command we were asking them to run.
I need to write about it ;). We won that case just before the last election and unfortunately other things took priority at the time. But it'll happen. Just first need to write about my IL supreme Court loss...
Honestly any interactive shell + unix tools + any scripting language you feel comfortable with should cover the majority of things you may want to do on the command line.
Not exactly BASIC per se, there was some CP/M like additions. However, you're right 'cause some of those commands are BASIC extension (e.g. RUN can be used from your programme, LIST maybe, but CATalog/DIRectory or LOAD often not.) Old good time.
