Ergonomica with Liam Schumm

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 Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. I would like to thank everyone who supports us on Patreon. Your contributions help to make the show sustainable. When you’re ready to launch your next project you’ll need somewhere to deploy it. Check out Linode at www.podastinit.com/linode?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss and get a $20 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for running your awesome app. Need to learn more about how to scale your apps or learn new techniques for building them? Pluralsight has the training and mentoring you need to level up your skills. Go to www.pythonpodcast.com/pluralsight?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss to start your free trial today. Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the newsletter, read the show notes, and get in touch. To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes, or Google Play Music, tell your friends and co-workers, and share it on social media. If you work with data for your job or want to learn more about how open source is powering the latest innovations in data science then make your way to the Open Data Science Conference, happening in London in October and San Francisco in November. Follow the links in the show notes to register and help support the show in the process. 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 Email @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 sh Homebrew The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA