Programming Language for Systems Administrator

[beliavsky at aol.com]

Brian van den Broek wrote:
> beliavsky at aol.com said unto the world upon 2005-04-12 08:11:
>
> <SNIP>
>
> > I actually like the Windows cmd language (it's an acquired taste),
but
> > I have read it is going away in Windows Longhorn (WH). That's an
> > argument for writing more complicated scripts in Python. WH is
supposed
> > to get a much better shell, called Monad, inspired by the
philosophy of
> > Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz :).
>
> Hi all,
>
> this is the first I've heard of Monad.
>
> Leibniz characterized his monads as the fundamental building blocks
of
> nature, insusceptible of change from the outside, and as
"windowless".
>
> So, if the account of MS's plans is true, it would seem to indicate a

> combination of arrogance, honesty, and ignorance. (I leave it to you
> to decide which part, if any, of this triad, is surprising.)
>
> Best to all,
>
> Brian vdB

I was joking about Leibniz, but from the Wikipedia article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSH_(shell) it appears that the codename
of the new Microsft shell was in small part inspired by the philosophy
of Leibniz:

"Central concepts
The system's codename comes from Gottfried Leibniz's "Monadology", a
philosophy which says that everything is a composition of fundamental
elements called 'Monads', which are all integrated together in
'pre-established harmony'. Similarly, the focus of MSH is on
composition of complex tasks from a series of components. In this case,
the components are special programs called commandlets (or cmdlets),
which are .NET classes designed to use the features of the environment.
The key difference between the Unix approach and the MSH one is that
rather than creating a "pipeline" based on textual input and output,
MSH passes data between the various commandlets as arbitrary objects.

If accessed individually from the command-line, a commandlet's output
will automatically be converted into text, but if its output is to be
used by another commandlet, it will be converted into whatever form of
object is most appropriate for that commandlet's input. This has the
advantage of eliminating the need for the many text-processing
utilities which are common in Unix pipelines, such as grep and awk, as
well as allowing things to be combined interactively, or in a scripting
environment, which would otherwise require a more complex programming
language. For instance, a listing of processes will consist not of text
describing them, but objects representing them, so that methods can be
called on those objects without explicit reference to any outside
structure or library.

MSH is part of an overall strategy within Longhorn to treat all parts
of the OS as .NET objects, and thus allow the user greater flexibility
over how they are used. This is aimed to make previously complex
interactions manageable within the bounds of frameworks such as MSH;
for example, Longhorn's registry can be exported as though it were a
filesystem, and navigated by treating it as a hierarchy of files and
directories."