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The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

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Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#21

Post by jff »

Analemma_ wrote: post #10

Everyone should, at some point, read The Unix-Haters Handbook. A great deal of it is outdated or simply wrong, but it does have a running theme of a prediction that has largely been borne out: people assuming that all Unix's flaws are actually virtues and that if you don't think so, then you Just Don't Get It. It's not hard to see how this happened: since pretty much all computers that people normally interact with a…

Having configured and used VMS, I feel I can conclusively say that the people in TUHH who preferred it to Unix were out of their goddamn minds.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#22

Post by CalChris »

Analemma_ wrote: post #10

Everyone should, at some point, read The Unix-Haters Handbook. A great deal of it is outdated or simply wrong, but it does have a running theme of a prediction that has largely been borne out: people assuming that all Unix's flaws are actually virtues and that if you don't think so, then you Just Don't Get It. It's not hard to see how this happened: since pretty much all computers that people normally interact with a…

I did not know about this!

http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

It even has an anti-foreword by Dennis Ritchie which kinda reminds me of the Metropolitan Police spokesman's blurb on the back of Banksy's book.

BTW, it starts off with an anonymous quote that I've never heard, Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. Unix is of course from Bell Labs. And anyone who knew anything would have said instead, Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and BSD which at least would have been funny if still inaccurate. Anyways, it seems like a fun rant of a book which I'd never heard of.

The above point about not getting it can be applied to Linux as well. Lessons learned elsewhere are stupid until Linus finally understands them and then they're obvious.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#24

Post by drivingmenuts »

I'd like to posit that at least part of the problem is we're using a multi-user operating system on machines that are universally single-user. While it may be nice to have that option, is it realistic to think that many people are going to hand over their laptop/desktop machine to another person?

We're trying to use a server OS on a single-user machine, complete with all the management cruft that comes along with a server-based OS. Consequently, we don't bother re-thinking what the user needs vs. a sysop.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#25

Post by technofiend »

drivingmenuts wrote: post #11

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.

http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-06-24

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#26

Post by maxaf »

smudgymcscmudge wrote: post #17
wyclif wrote: post #14

This 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.

I'm notorious for leaving behind gems such as this. For example: https://twitter.com/noahlz/status/767851284930199557

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#29

Post by lisper »

Analemma_ wrote: post #10

Everyone should, at some point, read The Unix-Haters Handbook. A great deal of it is outdated or simply wrong, but it does have a running theme of a prediction that has largely been borne out: people assuming that all Unix's flaws are actually virtues and that if you don't think so, then you Just Don't Get It. It's not hard to see how this happened: since pretty much all computers that people normally interact with a…

There are interesting parallels between operating systems and political parties here, and this is not a coincidence: both operating systems and political parties are infrastructure, and infrastructure is really hard both to build and to replace once it has become established. So in both cases you see a lot of rationalization about how the existing solutions are perfectly OK even though they are not simply because no one wants to do the heavy lifting (and in both cases it is very heavy lifting) required to actually come up with something better.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#30

Post by jondubois »

SwellJoe wrote: post #18
jondubois wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Installation on Windows was always much easier; all programs had a relatively consistent UI wizard that stepped you through the installation process. Installing software from disks on Windows was really convenient (and disks where the real deal back then).

The fact that Linux relied on people to install stuff with the command line was a massive oversight. UIs are just way more intuitive than shell commands.

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