Microsoft Releases A New Monad Command Shell Beta

Watercooler Warrior writes "Slashdot originally broke the news that a new Microsoft command shell was in the works when a reader noticed a suspicious job posting by Microsoft India. Today Microsoft released the first really usable version of the shell (codenamed Monad) to beta testers - and anyone who carefully reads the WinHEC slides about Monad will find how to join the beta and get a peek at it. The shell looks like a bunch of old-school Unix and Perl hackers were given free rein to do what they wanted with the .NET framework, and from what is known about the backgrounds of the Monad developers this is probably pretty close to the truth."

Google

Google has a new command shell coming out as well; the name? Gonad.

Re:Google

I can't believe you had the balls to tell such a horrible joke.

Re:Google

His only defense is that he's nuts.

It's about time

Because I unfortunately have to hack on a windoze box, I would love to see an improved command shell.

The current command shell just plain sucks when compared to OSX's or KDE's shells.

I can't wait to install.

truth={ moz: "sweet" }

Re:It's about time

Both of those are BASH (OSX used to use csh or maybe tsh but they switched it). Personally I LOVE BASH. After messing with Linux for a few years, the Windows shell drives me nuts. It's just so primitive feeling.

This is one of those situations where I think MS is doing a serious NIH (Not Invented Here) for no good reason. I can understand the reason to make Direct X instead of use OpenGL (for controll) and other such decisions. But I don't think having their own shell (instead of an implementaion of BASH) does them any good. I don't think it helps them sell more software. I don't think it helps them controll the market more. They should have taken BASH, and extended it with their .NET stuff.

I can use BASH on Linux, BSD, BeOS, OSX, and many many others. Why should I have to learn a new shell for Windows? Why can't they just accept it for once. It doens't cost them anything. If anything it would make porting apps over to Windows from other platforms EASIER.

At least make it so I can replace my shell easily (like you can change your default shell on other platforms)? That would be enough for me.

It's not exactly MS's fault that their current shell isn't very good. They've been going pure GUI and trying to keep people there. They've said DOS is dead and no one should ever have to use a CLI. So they've had no reason (based on that) to improve the shell since it's last incarnation, DOS 6.22. Of course now they are making a new CLI and making a big deal over it. Everything old is new again, eh?

I've been using an older version....

And I can't say I'm that impressed yet. I'd like to see man pages or something actually implemented. man currently does stuff but man doesn't work for any command I've tried (thus there don't seem to be *any* options). There's a lot of aliases built-in to emulate Unix (e.g. ls, ps) but the lack of grep makes piping seem...well pointless. The actual versions of commands seem entirely too object oriented and thus too verbose. "get-directory" is not something I want to type (I can't remember off the top of my head, but some of them are really absurd). "ps" is ps for a reason. No frequently used command should be more than 4 letters, or require you to use aliases so you don't end up writing a novel.

Your milaage may vary. I don't care about a scripting language. I have Perl (for Win32). As far as an interactive shell, it still has a lot of rough edges. Personally, I'd rather just use Cygwin/Bash and get a real shell.

(Though I talked to one of the guys personally and he seems pretty cool.)

Re:I've been using an older version....

The actual versions of commands seem entirely too object oriented and thus too verbose.

I can't imagine anybody who has ever used a CLI object-orienting it. Did some marketing drone get a say in the design.

The command line is more likely to be used for quick-and-dirty jobs, but the language involved (Bourne, C shell, etc...) can scale up to a larger, more maintainable project. The same can't be said about most object-oriented languages in the downward direction. Of course, maybe I just haven't seen the right ones.

Not bad...

The way it handles pipes is good - but FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLLY! GET. RID. OF. THE. PAPERCLIP!

(it looks like your writing a shell script)

This begs the question...

...what the HELL were old school hackers doing working for microsoft in the first place. ;)

Access for Monad Beta

Go to http://beta.microsoft.com [microsoft.com], login with your passport account.

The guest id is mshPDC.

Go nuts. :)

hm i love names that rhyme.,.

.. with human body parts.. monad.. go---.. ;-0

What's the Point?

There's already a plethora of shells out there, -- korn, bash, csh, zsh, and way more. And combined with ultilies like find, sed, grep, awk and with the added availablity of languages like perl, python, 'c' and all the lexical mulitude of routines that go with, ... what problem is Microsoft proposing to sovle here?

Microsoft should consider cooperating and improving what's already out there instead going it alone and reinventing the wheel. Unless, of course, all those old school Unix developers were really all wrong and now Microsoft's is taking the opportunity to show us how it's really done.

Flame Bait

[sub] http://developers.slashdot.org/article.
pl?sid=04/09/21/0153251&tid=201&tid=156&ti d=8
[sub] sweet
[sub] urrr, down with Microsoft
[sub] =)
[geek] cute (re /. link)
[geek] so they're now inventing stuff that's been around how many
decades?
[sub] alphageek: wait, they're going to patent everything
[sub] !!!!
[geek] should be fun to watch
[sub] yeap, recreate UNIX, patent it as they go, use said
patents against Linux
[sub] sounds like a business plan made in Redmond
[sub] even better, claim it's New Technology(TM) and claim that
UNIX/Linux is based off 40 year old technology
[sub] 10 years should be how long it takes MS to bastardize
UNIX/Linux

Screenshots?

I can't seem to find any.

~~~

This is pretty clever

Microsoft is doing something interesting and innovating. The Unix world could use this.

Basically, Monad formalizes in .NET the pipe interface between shell programs. A pipe participant is just something that implements the appropriate "commandlet" interface: it receives some input, produces some output, maybe some errors.

However, in the case of Monad the input and output can be anything, not just text. So in the example:

• get-process | where "handlecount -gt 400" | sort handlecount | out-chart processname,handlecount

The get-process command produces a sequence of processes; where filters it based on an attribute; sort sorts on an attribute, and out-chart produces a textual table of the filtered output.

It's important that the input and output of these processes are structures (actually, objects, but I don't want to tickle anyone's prejudices about OOP). .NET knows at runtime about the attributes these structures can have, so you can write apps that manipulate a wide variety of object types: files, metadata-annotated documents, log entries, whatever.

Naturally input/output can be pure text, allowing all the traditional Unix commands such as grep.

Immediate benefit? If you have the right translator, there's no need to munge text output using awkward tools like tr, cut, awk and so on, just to get at the process ID column of ps or the URL column of the Apache log file.

This is better than Unix shells.

Re:It's not quite all that

• Yes, everything's dandy, until you happen to be using two programs that don't export and import data in compatible formats.

You missed the part about the type system, then. Any program can access the data, because the data is packed in nice structured .NET types -- arrays, lists, instances, etc. You use reflection to inspect even types your program doesn't understand.

For example, if something wants to sort objects on an attribute "name", it doesn't need to know the type of the input: it just asks for the value of the name properties. Obviously a sorter needs to know how to compare values against each other: it needs, in short, to be able to turn anything into a string. Those things are solved using formal interfaces: if your "name" attribute is not a string object, it needs to support an interface that allows it to be turned into a string on command (just like Python's __str__(), Java's toString(), etc.). With .NET's type system and automatic boxing/unboxing you already have a rich set of types to interact with.

The challenge here is agreeing on a set of interfaces that make programs able to interact beyond the basic .NET primitives. For example, let's say the output of my program consists of image bitmaps. Something like a class with an (x, y) extent and a vector of RGB objects. All you need to share such objects is to specify the appropriate interface for clients to use. The client certainly doesn't need any of the originator program's code, just the interface.

If you think about it, such interfaces already exist in daily usage in a different format: JPEG. GIF. PNG. They're standards need for interoperability. In the same way, programs need to standardize their exchange mechanisms, and if you're saying that the solution is for "everything to be just text" (or more precisely, octet streams) then you're just moving the problem somewhere else. Ultimate, at some point that text/those octets need to become something else.

(By the way, I'm not a .NET developer.)

Re:It's not quite all that

You missed the part about the type system, then. Any program can access the data, because the data is packed in nice structured .NET types -- arrays, lists, instances, etc.

Sure, but all data structures in C are made of C primitives. That doesn't ensure that two programs can interoperate. The Windows Registry contains structured data. UNIX config files contain text. I can read almost every UNIX config file with little trouble (though I might need to look up what an option is to get precise data about it). The text files are intended to be read by people -- the config format is thus self-documenting. The Windows Registry is intended for programs to talk to programs. The interface *might* be human-readable but often devolves into cryptic encodings jammed into strings that aren't documented anywhere -- the interface is not self-documenting.

The same thing goes for *IX programs. You have a mass of programs that spit out human-readable text output. A self-documenting format, one intended to be read by humans. Now, depending on how benevolent the .NET application author is feeling, an application *might* be able to spit out data that can be understood by a human. It also might just expose data that can't be used worth a damn except by another program.

Now, I agree that the idea of data pipelines of more complex data can be useful. Frankly, I like the idea of even-more-powerful graph programming languages, as certain data-processing environments sometimes use -- image-processing, audio-processing. However, I've rather more dubious when it comes to general-purpose pipelines.

Also, think about the social issues. *IX world -- do the bare minimum to be usable by a human, and your program is interfaced with. Microsoft world -- you need to go above and beyond.

And the roles that data pipeline programs play. *IX world -- data pipelines are generally quick 'n dirty tools. They let you write custom and personal tools in a snap. If you want to interface functionality, you use full-blown libraries, with an API that isn't limited by the structure of a pipeline. Microsoft world -- new program structure for introducing a limited interface between programs, intended for more serious programming.

Re:It's not quite all that

Just because all your programs input / output ASCII, that doesn't make them "compatable formats".

I've got bitten more than once by filenames with spaces in, and always thought it would be nice if there was more structure to the input and outputs. Once I got badly bitten by some joker who decided to make a file called "-rf" (yes, you can make such a file). This kind of system with more structure makes it much easier to seperate filenames, switches, etc. in a clean and safe manner. I'm quite looking forward to it myself.

Excellect win32 shells exist, but...

I must confess my ignorance: Does perl have a .net interface yet?

Is this related to one of those magical moments?

Illustrated here. [slashdot.org]

Reminds me of the "Magical Microsoft Moments" story:

I've been attending the USENIX NT and LISA NT (Large Installation Systems Administration for NT) conference in downtown Seattle this week.

One of those magical Microsoft moments(tm) happened yesterday and I thought that I'd share. Non-geeks may not find this funny at all, but those in geekdom (particularly UNIX geekdom) will appreciate it.

Greg Sullivan, a Microsoft product manager (henceforth MPM), was holding forth on a forthcoming product that will provide Unix style scripting and shell services on NT for compatibility and to leverage UNIX expertise that moves to the NT platform. The product suite includes the MKS (Mortise Kern Systems) windowing Korn shell, a windowing PERL, and lots of goodies like awk, sed and grep. It actually fills a nice niche for which other products (like the MKS suite) have either been too highly priced or not well enough integrated.

An older man, probably mid-50s, stands up in the back of the room and asserts that Microsoft could have done better with their choice of Korn shell. He asks if they had considered others that are more compatible with existing UNIX versions of KSH.

The MPM said that the MKS shell was pretty compatible and should be able to run all UNIX scripts.

The questioner again asserted that the MKS shell was not very compatible and didn't do a lot of things right that are defined in the KSH language spec.

The MPM asserted again that the shell was pretty compatible and shouldwork quite well.

This assertion and counter assertion went back and forth for a bit, when another fellow member of the audience announced to the MPM that the questioner was, in fact David Korn of AT&T (now Lucent) Bell Labs--the author of the Korn shell.

Uproarious laughter burst forth from the audience, and it was one of the only times that I have seen a (by then pink cheeked) MPM lost for words or momentarily lacking the usual unflappable confidence.

Msh misses the point

The fine thing with a shell is that when you have issued the same series of commands numerous times you can simply put them in a script - automation done!

However MSH seems (with its OO-influenced design) to be a bit too complex for ordinary work. If people dont use it for ordinary work, they cant write scripts "for free".

The problem today isnt that Windows cant be scripted - it can via VBScript.

UNIX shells are constructed the way they are because users should BOTH use them for scripting, and for every other task. M$ compromises with simplicity (with its OO-design), so MSH will never be as productive as, for example tcsh.

Is it just me...

..or is this indicative of a wider trend, where Windows and Linux are coming together from a technology perspective?

Think about it. Over the past few years, the windowing environments in Linux have grown more and more advanced. With the newer XOrg releases and upcoming KDE4 and Gnome 3, I expect amazing things from the Linux desktop.

Meanwhile, while Linux has been addressing it's core weakness, Microsoft already has a firm foothold on the desktop. Instead, the past few years they have been integrating more and more sysadmin-friendly technologies - such as integrating scripting into the OS, improving their command shell (and replacing it - hence Monad), improving remote administration.

Windows has WinFS, Linux has Reiser4 + plugins.

In the next few years, I doubt a layman will be able to tell Windows and Linux apart from a purely features / technology perspective. What *ill*be important, is he thing that is the most important - who do you trust with the source code to your OS? A private company or a group of hackers.

Monad is the code name ...

so what's the release name, TEL.NET?

(old joke, felt the need to revive it!)

It's about time!

My computer experience started with MS-DOS 3.3. I became pretty good at writing batch files.

I loved DOS and resisted Windows at first. As we all have since learned, resistance is futile and I was assimilated.

Then, I discovered *nix and I saw the light... a powerful operating system with a command line. I've never looked back.

My colleagues and friends all think I'm fully Anti-Microsoft, but I just prefer to seek alternatives to Microsoft's overpriced products.

If this command shell becomes a truly powerful command shell and scripting language, and I allow myself to forget that Microsoft is an evil company bent on world domination, then this has the potential to make me secretly like Microsoft, a little, again... I'm soooo ashamed...

We'll see... I just signed up for the beta.

--
-- GhodMode

Why not admit to SQL?

It's great that they're trying to do something at a higher structural level. The Unix command line data structure is essentially just a sequence of '\n'-terminated lines. But while it looks like each filter command is doing its own thing (where, sort, group, etc.), they're really just doing the equivalent of an SQL 'SELECT'. I wonder why they are forcing the Unix-style pipeline syntax instead of a syntax that maps well to the relational model.

Monad on Windows 2000?

With the .Net runtime installed, is it possible to utilize Monad with Windows 2000 Pro?

Iron Python

I wonder how Iron Python might use what these folks are doing? I can see that this shell may have some slick features-but I don't see a compelling innovation here. What I see is a lot of investment in doing some basic stuff to make windows work that should have been done long ago. If it it done vaguely correctly I suspect some better tools will take advantage of the groundwork being laid here.

Re:Monad == ??

I work at MS and that's how my manager introduced it to me.

"It's Monad. Like Gonad, with an M."

There was a talk about this at the PDC, too. Amazingly cool stuff.

It's more than just a new command shell. It's a new framework for creating command- or script-driven software compoents. It makes it easy to little apps that can parse parameters and return structured data (not just text).

Here's an example from the slides:

get-process | where "handlecount -gt 400" | sort handlecount

Re:Monad == ??

First thing I thought when I saw Monad was its definition from category theory. A Monad is a triple, containing a functor, and 2 natural homomorphisms.

Less cryptic, is its use in Haskell as way of parameterizing computations. Specifically its used to produce the I/O Monad which is parameterized by some type A in the pair IO : a -> world -> (a, world).

More in line with ur question, the word Monad comes from greek , and it means "one" "single " or "unique". So I guess they think this is a "unique" bit of work.

Monad == Best_Name_Ever

Sounds too much like gonad.
I absolutely refuse to believe for even a second that this was an accident. Maybe they are trying to make it such an obvious joke that it stops being funny after a few days. I hope they try this with more products, they could rename MS Office "Pen by Microsoft", or call the command prompt in the next windows release "Direct Input Command Keyin Like Engine". Also, anything named "Venus" would be cool.

Re:Monad == ??

I heard they considered Microsoft Menis and Microsoft Magina too.

Re:Monad == ??

Marketting. Period.
Believe me. I got stuck with the name "Gword" for
a well known dictionary I did here in Greece a while
ago. Still, even the hacker gets his revenge -

Little known easter egg (any greek friends out there)
if you start my program with any two command params
it doesn't put up that pesky splash bit map.

Re:Monad == ??

You are my friend for life. "Feel the power of one nut"!! Monad!