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Because as we all know, learning the ins and outs of commands designed for teletypes with 50 years of incremental evolution, where the only common interchange format is ASCII, and all sitting atop kernels that think fork() is a good idea, is extremely pleasant.


Yes and no. Learning UNIX is a bit like learning LISP - the parentheses don't look "exteremely pleasant" but having (1) a shared serialization format (2) common programmatic interface (3) a culture of REPLs makes everything much more discoverable and gives you power you would never get where each interface is a shiny bespoke thing.

There a lot of kludges, especially around teletypes/terminals, yes. But the common interchange format being ~ASCII~ UTF-8 makes learning the ins and outs way more pleasant than if everything gets connected by COM, .dll APIs, inscrutable .inf files or whatever Microsoft thinks up at a given decade (you can notice I've stayed away for a while)...

Now Excel stands aside as as environment where learning _was_ pleasant, everything had an inspectable representation and a shared interface! Despite arrays bounds and reuse-by-copy-paste being messy, spreadsheets remain a sweet spot of bringing power to "low-code" users. I didn't look into this specific project enough to say where falls on lock-in-vs-interoperability scale, but IMHO the world needs more "spreadsheet plus" experimentation so I wish them the best...




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