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The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

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Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#61

Post by danielweber »

jondubois wrote: post #30
SwellJoe wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

It's not using the command line that sucks about installing software.

It's that there are so many different standards for installing software, overlapping in sometimes conflicting ways.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#62

Post by monochromatic »

CalChris wrote: post #22
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 A great deal of it is outdated or simply wrong, but it does have a running theme of a prediction that has largely been borne out: people assuming that all Unix's flaws are actually virtues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 i…

From the anti-foreward:

> Here is my metaphor: your book is a pudding stuffed with apposite observations, many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain life for some. But it is not a tasty pie: it reeks too much of contempt and of envy.

> Bon appetit!

Pretty good.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#63

Post by CalChris »

vacri wrote: post #51
CalChris wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

> Lessons learned elsewhere are stupid until Linus finally understands them and then they're obvious. I think you're suffering from selection bias.

I do have a bias against select(2) but I'm not alone:

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/usenix99/full_papers/ban...

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#64

Post by strictfp »

drivingmenuts wrote: post #24

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 s…

Yeah, we need to abandon this complicated Multics and create a single-user OS! Let's call it something with "uni" in it - maybe "Unix"?

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#65

Post by CalChris »

eternalban wrote: post #41
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…

> flaws are actually virtues and that if you don't think so, then you Just Don't Get It. Hey, that sounds like Go's line. Oh wait ..

Sounds just like Rust as well.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#66

Post by protomyth »

jff wrote: post #21
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.

To defend VMS, if you have to have an always up with hot backup and multi-machine cluster that you can upgrade without affecting the cluster, OpenVMS is quite nice.

As a developer, it was a bit painful, but the whole file versioning was handy sometimes.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#67

Post by malcolmgreaves »

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.

There's such a problem with immaturity in tech. It's frustrating because it creates barriers to learning from others. No self-respecting person is going to want to learn from someone who has a "holier than thou" or "I'm a rockstar" mindset.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#68

Post by Koshkin »

haberman wrote: post #35
CalChris wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

From the book: "Did you know that all the standard Sun window applications (“tools”) are really one massive 3/4 megabyte binary?" Oh for the days when 750kB was considered "massive" for a binary.

IIRC, the original (1969) version of UNIX was designed to run on a computer with 24 kilobytes of RAM.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#69

Post by int_handler »

prodmerc wrote: post #60

You're free to take it all and turn it into an OS of your vision. Next thing - bitch about how Earth works, with every region, country and even, gasp , city is different because a few people a long time ago decided "this is the way to go".

Similarly, our appendices, which are useless to begin with, occasionally decides to become infected, swell, and possibly burst, threatening our lives, just because biology a long time ago decided "this is the way to go."
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