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The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

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Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#71

Post by metaobject »

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.

Perhaps the issue when comparing Windows and Linux is more one of "dependency management" than just merely installing applications or libraries? Although I've had issues with package managers screwing up dependencies in the past, it hasn't happened in a while and when it would have happened I was warned beforehand.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#72

Post by ChristianBundy »

maxaf wrote: post #26
smudgymcscmudge wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> notorious

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#73

Post by bcantrill »

jff wrote: post #38
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…

The whole document is great but the anti-forward is so good I'm going to risk downvotes by reproducing it in its (short) entirety here, emphasis mine: From: dmr@plan9.research.att.com Date: Tue, 15 Mar 1994 00:38:07 EST Subject: anti-foreword To the contributers to this book: I have succumbed to the temptation you offered in your preface: I do write you off as envious malcontents and romantic keepers of memories. The…

Thank you for posting this here; I absolutely love that anti-foreward, and it was life-changing for me in that it offered shelter to those of us who were defending Unix during a very, very dark time (namely, the mid-1990s). I have also (shamelessly) cribbed dmr's beautiful closing metaphor of a fecal pie and its "undigested nuggets of nutrition" -- it seems to just describe so much that is not entirely devoid of value, but it utterly foul nonetheless.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#74

Post by protomyth »

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?

For the average user, the worst install on Mac OS is drag icon from dmg into Apps folder. The other type is double clicking a package.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#75

Post by jff »

skissane wrote: post #55
jff wrote: post #16

Although 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 leas…

> - 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 la…

If you look at Plan 9, you'll see /usr is once again the location of user home directories, and binaries go in /bin. In fact, /bin is a 'union' directory composed of /386/bin, /rc/bin, /usr/jff/bin, and any other places you've decided to put binaries.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#76

Post by [deleted] »

skissane wrote: post #55
jff wrote: post #16

Although 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 leas…

> - 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 la…

[deleted]

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#77

Post by hexane360 »

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.

Isn't this ironically referencing a lot of Unix development?

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#78

Post by metaobject »

bch wrote: post #40

> Some people think that UNIX is great and perfect "...great and perfect" is a strawman. Whether "some people" think that is irrelevant. Some of this article is interesting, but the fact of the matter is 40-year-old systems have signs of being 40 years old. If "fixing" everything were easy, it'd be done. Tabs in Makefiles throw off the uninitiated for 10 minutes, then they learn, shrug and move on. These scars and st…

"This could get the same treatment as /etc/passwd if it becomes a burden. In the meantime, if it's a performance bottleneck, make a memoizing function to lookup groups and use a '-n' switch to ls."

Exactly, and this is the sort of thing that can be done with open source software. It may not even be a lot of code depending on how it is approached.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#79

Post by favorited »

pjmlp wrote: post #46
Animats wrote: post #33

There are many early UNIX design decisions that have outlived their shelf life by decades. Probably the biggest one is that UNIX is, at bottom, a terminal-oriented multi-user time sharing system. This maps badly to desktop, mobile, and server systems. The protection model is a mismatch for all those purposes. (Programs have the authority of the user. Not so good today as in the 1970s.) The administration model also m…

Hence why UNIX on mobile is a Pyrrhic victory, as iOS, Android, ChromeOS rely on Objective-C, Java and JavaScript runtimes and their respective frameworks, just with good enough support from POSIX, that could be replaced by what is expected from any ANSI C implementation.

Isn't that the whole point of POSIX though?
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