August 20, 2017

Ergonomica with Liam Schumm

42 minutes

Summary

As developers we spend a lot of our work day in a terminal window, using shells that were designed 30 years ago. This week Liam Schumm joins me to explain why he decided to write a new, more ergonomic shell environment to simplify his workflow.

Preface

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Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Liam Schumm about Ergonomica

Interview

Introductions

How did you get introduced to Python?

What is Ergonomica and what was your reason for creating it?

What are some of the most difficult aspects of the project that you have experienced?

How is Ergonomica implemented?

What was your reason for using a dialect of Lisp as the interface for a terminal environment as opposed to iterating on the idioms in shells such as Bash?

How does Ergonomica’s implementation differ from traditional shells such as Bash, Csh, and Powershell?

How does Ergonomica’s implementation differ from other alternative shells such as Xonsh, ZSH, and Fish?

Why did you choose to implement Ergonomica in Python?

What’s your target group for Ergonomica?

What do you have planned for the future of Ergonomica?

Reading through your website you are fairly well accomplished. How does your age factor into the kinds of projects that you are engaged in?

Keep In Touch

Liam’s GitHub

@liamschumm on Twitter

Picks

Tobias

Magic The Gathering: Arena of the Planeswalkers

Liam

GitLab CE

Python-prompt-toolkit

Thriftbooks – 15% off your first order

Links

PyGame

Minecraft

Beeware

ChiPy

Chi Hack Night

XKCD Tar Comic

POSIX

Colorama

PLY

Peter Norvig

How to write a lisp interpreter in python

ZSH

Fish

Xonsh

PyVim

Homebrew

The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

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By Tobias Macey

4.4

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