IMHO, a lot of the Unix philosophy boils down to: we do it this way because the neckbeard of my father and the neckbeard of his father and all the neckbeards before him unto the beginning of Unix on January 1, 1970 did it that way and if you want to do it differently, well, you better have a stronger neckbeard, because then we'll have two problems instead of just one.
The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
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Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#12> I guess there wasn’t even Microsoft DOS at the time (I guess and I don’t bother to check, so check it yourself)
1969 < 1981.
Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#13Where everything is a file handle, except when it is not (sockets, IPC, ...).
Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#14This article was written hastily, and I don’t want to further improve it. You’re lucky I wrote it.
I feel so privileged to read this random guy's blog, and it's terrific that he eschews inflating his ego so well.
Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#15I think the problem is that Linux developers started abusing the Unix Philosophy to the point that you had to know about a lot of different programs in order to be productive - Sometimes, it's much more convenient if one program can do everything that you want it to do out of the box (it requires less understanding of the system). The Unix philosophy is essentially the opposite of the Apple philosophy. It gives you f…
I didn't find MacOS to be any simpler than newbie-oriented Linux distros like Mint and Ubuntu. It was just filled with a ton of proprietary, bastardized, closed-source garbage and limits that made it more difficult for power users to understand and effectively manage the system.
To be fair Linux distros have improved a LOT in the past 5 years. When I first used Ubuntu many years ago, you couldn't do anything without the command line. Installing software was a pain (I had tons of problem with Ubuntu Software Center and it never seemed to work).
I use Ubuntu (Gnome) these days. The only thing I miss from Windows is Windows Explorer. Nautilus just doesn't cut it in my opinion; I always end up browsing the file system with the command line. That said, I still prefer Nautilus over OSX's Finder.
Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#16Although I agree that Unix is a big collection of hacks and well past its prime, the author displays several fundamental misconceptions of what he's talking about. Here's a few examples:
- Dirty hacks in UNIX started to arise when UNIX was released, and it was long before Windows came to the scene, I guess there wasn’t even Microsoft DOS at the time (I guess and I don’t bother to check, so check it yourself). At least he acknowledges that he's being incredibly lazy, and he shows the glimmer of an understanding as to why some of the things mentioned later happened: because Unix is from the early 70s, which were a very different time in computing & culture.
- Almost at the very beginning, there was no /usr folder in UNIX. All binaries were located in /bin and /sbin. /usr was the place for user home directories (there was no /home). Putting /home on a separate partition remains a pretty common thing to this day because users will tend to have greater storage requirements than just the root. /usr/bin and the like are the result of people realizing that this secondary larger disk is an acceptable place to put binaries and other files that aren't needed at bootup.
- In other words, if you’ve captured Ctrl+C from the user’s input, then the operating system, instead of just calling your handler, will interrupt the syscall that was running before and return EINTR error code from the kernel. That's not the kind of interrupt they're talking about.
- I’ve read somewhere that the cp command is called cp not because of copy but because UNIX was developed with the use of terminals that output characters very slowly. Yep, terminals that print on paper are pretty slow, as are 300 baud modems. I'm absolutely crushed I had to learn that 'cp' means 'copy'--it took hours to beat that into my head, and the thousands of keystrokes I've saved over the years are a small comfort (except to my rsi-crippled hands)
- The names of UNIX utilities is another story. For example, grep comes from command g/re/p in the ed text editor. Well, cat comes from concatenation. I hope you already knew it. To top it all up, vmlinuz — gZipped LINUx with Virtual Memory support. 'cat' comes from 'catenate', in fact. What would you name 'grep' instead? "searchregexandprint"?
- at least the main website of C that would be the main entry point for all beginners and would contain not only documentation but also a brief manual on installing C tools on any platform, as well as a manual on creating a simple project in C, and would also contain a user-friendly list of C packages This is one of the most ridiculous ones. You're talking about a programming language defined in the 70s, for Christ's sake. Lot of websites created in the 70s? There is a document with a good introduction to C, project examples, etc. and it's call The C Programming Language, a book by K&R. When Kernighan made another language a few years ago, yeah, he made a website for it--golang.org, it's one of the best project sites I've seen.
The article points out some legit problems in Unix, but even leaving aside the author's ESL challenges it's poorly-written, poorly thought-out, and poorly-defended.
Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#17This article was written hastily, and I don’t want to further improve it. You’re lucky I wrote it. I feel so privileged to read this random guy's blog, and it's terrific that he eschews inflating his ego so well.
I want to add this as a comment in all my source files.
Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't find MacOS to be any simpler than newbie-oriented Linux distros like Mint and Ubuntu. It was just filled with a ton of proprietary, bastardized, closed-source garbage and limits that made it more difficult for power users to understand and effectively manage the system.
To be fair Linux distros have improved a LOT in the past 5 years. When I first used Ubuntu many years ago, you couldn't do anything without the command line. Installing software was a pain (I had tons of problem with Ubuntu Software Center and it never seemed to work). I use Ubuntu (Gnome) these days. The only thing I miss from Windows is Windows Explorer. Nautilus just doesn't cut it in my opinion; I always end up b…
"Installing software was a mess."
Of all the things to complain about in Linux, you choose the one thing that Mac OS and Windows still don't have right, and Linux had pretty good even back then?
Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#19Unix as we know it is almost 50 years of accretion - sh/bash is a great example of this. I think the Unix philosophy is still sound and alive, but the movement of technology means not everything that was universal before, is now.
Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#20For those of you who might be fooled into thinking this is about things like SystemD and Docker—it's not!
More a reprise of the _Unix Hater's Handbook_ with a slightly different gloss, for those who remember that.
Though a Unix Lover(tm), I enjoyed the UHH: