Unix Shell Programming: The Next 50 Years (The Future of the Shell, Part I)

submited by

Style Pass

2021-07-18 16:30:05

This week’s paper won the distinguished presentation award at HotOS 2021, and discusses the potential for future innovation in the tool that many use every day - the shell!A previous submission of this paper on Hacker News elicited a number of strong reactions. One reaction was the assertion that there are in fact modern shells - Elvish features most prominently. While I think several of the comments on the original posting are in the right direction, my takeaway from this paper was that modern shells could take advantage of exciting advances in other areas of systems research (in particular, data flow and transparent parallelization of computation).

It not only proposes a way forward to address (what the authors view) as the shell’s sharp edges, but also references a number of other interesting papers that I will publish paper reviews of over the next few weeks - the gist of several of the papers are mentioned further on in this article:

In Unix Shell Programming: The Next 50 Years, the authors argue that while the shell is a powerful tool, it can be improved for modern users and workflows. To make this argument, the paper first considers “the good, the bad, and the ugly” of shells in order to outline what should (or should not) change in shells going forward.