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Bonzai Shell will be bonsh.Cmd

I do like the name bonsh. That will be the command that starts an interactive REPL or just processes all of its arguments as a single line of bonsh shell code. Technically, if will be the shell subcommand of the bon branch but shell will be the default subcommand (instead of help). This an then be made into a shortcut in the composing tree as z shell or z sh. (I don’t give a shit about zsh confusion, which is a dangerously stupid shell that no one should ever use.)

I’m going to heavily steal from the best of Perl contextual variables. The bon.Shell will maintain a central buffer that is sent to the standard input of any command in the list separated by the command inline separator (dash, -).

For example, the subcommand load of the bon.Shell command would fill that buffer and that’s it.

z sh load foo.txt - prefix someprefix

This is the exact equivalent of the following shell command but does not rely on any specific shell implementation. The Bonzai command is the shell.

z prefix someprefix < foo.txt

And if it concerns you that I’m loading everything into memory, consider that another subcommand could be written to send each line, one at a time.

z sh each line foo.txt - prefix someprefix

Or, say you want to handle each UNICODE codepoint one at a time.

z sh each rune foo.txt - prefix someprefix

And since UNIX/Linux has turned everything, everywhere into a file, we can use the command to open files that are sockets, pipes, or whatever. In fact, the only thing needed on the device is a filesystem that is supported by Go.

The beauty of Bonzai is that it is entirely modular, just like the best principles of the UNIX philosophy. In fact, I’m just ripping off the UNIX philosophy and “filters” design principle and putting it all into a single monolith command, which seems against the UNIX way, but it really isn’t if you consider that any Bonzai composite tree is UNIX (in a way). I mean that. All GNU/Linux/UNIX commands will eventually make their way into Bonzai trees and can be composed into a single monolith that can go anywhere. At that point we won’t just have “Bonzai Linux”, we’ll have something outside the boundaries of both UNIX and Linux, an entirely different paradigm of monolith modularity to rival virtualization and containerization before. The binary is the distro (much like BusyBox championed all those years ago.). We don’t even care what the operating system is at all. Let me say that again, WE DO NOT GIVE A SHIT ABOUT THE OPERATING SYSTEM OR ARCHITECTURE! (‘cuz Go). This will revolutionize tools development in general once it catches on.

I really am going to need to write an O’Reilly/Manning book just about Bonzai before hitting the conference circuit with it in 2023. I’m now shooting for Bonzai v1.0.0 on Christmas 2022.

#bonzai #shell
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