# Nushell core team meeting 2024-08-07
## Attendees
- Devyn
- Andy
- Michael
- Stefan
- Darren
- Jack
- Antoine
- Rose

## Agenda
- [x] Material for demo
- [x] Whether to or not to merge `polars sink` and `polars to-` into one `polars save` command
- [x] Do we want to ship the assignment change in one release? (backtick string behavior, impact on existing scripts)

## Discussed Topics

### Stefan's demo

- Send him some quick oneliners that are really impressive for a demo
- Ask Sophia?
- Look at Reilly's demo
- The wayback machine [1st reedline video](https://web.archive.org/web/20230525192434/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXVyHsRR168)

### Polars

- `polars sink` is a new command that uses the streaming stuff to stream directly to disk from a lazyframe
- actually maybe we want `polars save` instead? unify the `polars to-` whatever with sink?
- automatically handle lazyframes
- don't need to stay true to the polars API
- options for different data formats?
- key/value or use actual nushell options?
- the actual nushell options are self-documenting so that's nice
- doing stuff more lazily when possible
- Would like to have more nushell-like apis for some things

### Plugins as modules

- Would be nice to be able to rename plugins entirely e.g. `plugin use polars as pl`
- having them be modules would work
- Modules currently interact weirdly with the help system, gwenya has done some work on this but there's probably more to be done

### assignment with backticks

- This could be a major gotcha
- ```
$foo = `bar`

  now behaving quite differently
- We might not want backticks to work this way
- Maybe force people to use the carets to run an external command with spaces special character
- how relevant is the backtick string 
    - acts like a bare word
    - execute in command position otherwise acts like a string
    - Does not apply `\` escaping (so escape hatch for windows paths vs. `""` strings)
    - could this be just a regular string type without escaping `''` and for execution you require `^` (our internal command handle the spaces for subcommands anyways so no need for quoting there.)
    - have completion add the `^` when necessary, in command position
    - globs: this works right now:

ls `*.txt`

- maybe backtick quotes doing (glob) expansion (while permitting whitespace) is still good


### effect of the assignment change

$env.EDITOR = vim

would now execute instead of assign (:wq)

Unlikely to be totally destructive but annoying to mitigate if in configs or scripts

If we want to do a warning phase it would only catch the most actively updating users.

Solution: just require a caret for external in assignment RHS for a few releases, so the impact is mitigated and at some point we can sunset the caret requirement.