It still blows my mind [...] the typical response is along the lines of, "but what would you use it for?" [...] When is it not useful to see the data your code is operating on?
Status Quo? (the status quo being... print statements?)
Another easy example of a long available better model that is still niche/ignored: pipelines in PowerShell [1] are clearly superior in many fronts, but people prefer keep parsing plain text with regular expressions rather than learn a new shell language.
It shouldn't be such a shock that people prefer text. Text is the universal format. The vast majority of programming tools operate on it. When someone comes up with a new tool, if they support text and STDIN/STDOUT/STDERR then that's it, they're done.
PowerShell sounds great and I'm sure there are some people who are very productive with it but it's ultimately a silo. It's never going to be as low-friction to support as text.
Comments
Status Quo? (the status quo being... print statements?)
Another easy example of a long available better model that is still niche/ignored: pipelines in PowerShell [1] are clearly superior in many fronts, but people prefer keep parsing plain text with regular expressions rather than learn a new shell language.
1: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/gettin...
It shouldn't be such a shock that people prefer text. Text is the universal format. The vast majority of programming tools operate on it. When someone comes up with a new tool, if they support text and STDIN/STDOUT/STDERR then that's it, they're done.
PowerShell sounds great and I'm sure there are some people who are very productive with it but it's ultimately a silo. It's never going to be as low-friction to support as text.
Text is the universal serialization format. Doesn't mean it has to be unstructured, as is the UNIX tradition.