Hello, from operand.online

I publish a collection of Nushell commands that I use daily, at gram:nue - here's how I reached where I am now.

In October 2023, coders at HacDC had persuaded me to learn NixOS, and a former colleague persuaded me to check on Elixir. I began to build in these languages, because I'd been unemployed since February when the House of Reps said, "no need for experimental prototypes, goodbye."

As I began to pick up the pace with these two languages in January 2024, I realized that I'd fallen behind on my learning commitment. I had aimed to pick up Nushell in 2023 also. I had been through innumerable shells by now, so I grit my teeth to dig in, expecting all the pain of migration-and-abandonment that had come from fish and xiki.

There was no "aha" moment. There were many. Too many. Each day seemed like, "Why would I build an app for this when I can do the query I need in my shell?" My full career path as a web-app coder collapsed into "do I really need more than the command-line and a capable package manager?"

So, in December I finally broke up my build codebase that had been running since 2016 and documents my progression through each shell. I expanded these configs into dedicated code for NuShell, called nue, and NixOS, called nux.

NuShell has clicked to such a degree that I no longer had a need to learn Rust. I'm finally exploring that language for game-development and webassembly ( https://bfnightly.bracketproductions.com/ ), after accomplishing years of crucial use cases in the much more user-space landscape that Nu encompasses.

Meanwhile, my web app had paused progress. The Elixir web framework Phoenix had become too cumbersome to program for. I'd been long used to a hodgepodge of languages from my days on Ruby on Rails, and Phoenix seemed to be pushing me in that direction also. Why would I learn such a cumbersome web library when i need to use React at the end of the day regardless?

So, 8 days ago when the library Nex released, I decided to rebuild.

My app already focuses on the display of code, and as I rebuild I'd like to embrace the approaches of Literate Programming to encourage discussions amid the lines of code. This is an area that GitHub has abandoned, compared to their focus on the proceduralism of code review pipelines, and the recommendation modalities of AI. NuShell is one of a few codebases that I'm eager to hold up as examples, alongside the code of Ink & Switch and chosen Elixir libraries.

I'm opening a discussion on the NuShell GitHub codebase to discuss an appraisal of their source code for security purposes. I'd like to also examine the directions they aim to adopt for concerns like nu-language package management. As much as I can encourage adoption, I'm glad to do so. This language is going to echo in my brain for the remainder of my career.