stshell VS toaststunt

It's slowly getting traction - Kotlin on Android has a "live update" feature (in development, only available in alpha release), for example. Multiple less mainstream languages also offer the feature. Nim got it in the last major release, for example. V has it as one of the base features. Erlang and Elixir had it since forever. Common Lisp as well. Racket and Clojure are a little more limited than CL, but also support it. Many interpreted languages offer some degree of this, either by default (JavaScript) or as a library/package (Python, Ruby).

In general, programming language features take about 20 to 30 years to go from obscure niche implementation into the mainstream. Look at lambdas - anonymous function literals - they're now everywhere, including Java and C++. Ten years ago, though, only some scripting languages had it. The feature itself is as old as the bones of the Earth (LISP, 1960, 63 years old). The same is true for many other "advanced" features. I think this is tied to generational changes - each generation of programmers has a chance to bring one or two lesser known features into mainstream, and then they're content with that. Other features have to wait for the next generation to discover them.

As for Smalltalk - I made a mistake and based the implementation on GNU Smalltalk, which is unmaintained. I should have gone with Smalltalk/X, Visual Works, or (begrudgingly) Pharo (or Cuis). I started the project as yet another attempt at making a MUD, but then changed focus to making a productive command-line-based programming env for Smalltalk. Then I changed my mind again and tried to make it into a usable shell. Here's the project: https://github.com/piotrklibert/stshell/ The screenshots focus on the REPL/shell side, but in the source you'll see things like "server", "player", and "world". There are a few locations IIRC and you can move your character between them still. It was an interesting project, but without a clear vision of what it should be it lost focus and I left it to rot after a while :(

> We need better shells.

Obviously. I don't think this is the most important missing part, though. I would say it differently: we need way, way better REPLs.

IPython is an example of a REPL that's passable as a shell. It can run in a terminal and has a GUI version based on Qt, which allows displaying images inline. You can drop into a "real" shell with a single `!` character (you get pipes, output capture, and (Python) variable interpolation), and it even has some syntactic shortcuts for the parts where Python's own syntax is irritatingly verbose. If you like Python, then IPython can be your day-to-day shell right now. You just need to remember not to start ncurses programs from within qtconsole (works ok in terminal). I used it for a few years when I was forced to work on Windows. Before my time, I heard it was popular to use tclsh as a shell on Windows.

I think that it proves that almost any language can be used as a shell, as long as its REPL is as rich and featureful enough. Since you can use Python as a shell, which as a language is not exactly the epitome of terseness and expressiveness, you could definitely make do with almost any other interpreted language, too. The problem is that very, very few languages have REPLs that are anywhere near IPython. It's so bad sometimes that you're advised to use `rlwrap` just to get basic line editing and history!

I've been working on a new shell based on GNU Smalltalk[1]. I really like the syntax - or lack of thereof - and being able to dump an image at any time seemed like a good idea. The only change I needed was to add the `|>` pseudo-operator, which puts what's on the left into parens. Being able to introspect the running session was my primary motivation: I wanted to make the shell and the whole environment as discoverable as possible. I wrote some code for that and then realized that the default REPL uses readline from C, so it freezes the entire VM when waiting for input (including all background threads). My workaround was to set up a socket server and connect to it via rlwrapped telnet...

Anyway, I think "do we need a new shell" is the wrong question; instead, we should focus on improving REPLs to the point where a separate shell becomes unnecessary.

[1] https://github.com/piotrklibert/stshell

ToastStunt is an actively developed fork of Stunt which is a fork of LambdaMOO. It's extended a lot of what LambdaMOO offered via patches, as well as adding a lot of new and much needed stuff. Active Discord community as well. And several large MOOs are running it instead of LambdaMOO these days.

https://github.com/lisdude/toaststunt

ToastStunt

ToastStunt is a fork of Stunt which is a fork of LambdaMOO. ToastStunt adds a bunch of features and is under active development. I worked with the knowledgeable folx on the ToastStunt Discord and the primary devs, to update the classic LambdaMOO Programmers Guide for ToastStunt.

TLS support was recently added to ToastStunt, so any MOOs running that have the option. The biggest that come to mind are Miriani and ChatMUD. They also use argon2id for password hashing rather than the usual crypt(), if that sort of thing is important to you.

MUDs (MOOs specifically) were super formative for me. Learned to code from playing with LambdaMOO and helping develop Sindome (www.sindome.org)

If anyone is interested in a modern / updated LamdaMOO server check out ToastStunt: https://github.com/lisdude/toaststunt