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The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

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Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#81

Post by yellowapple »

Most of the author's criticisms around the Unix Philosophy™ (aside from perhaps the performance aspect) would be solvable in two steps:

1) Standardize on some structured text serialization format (I like YAML for this)

2) Write a new shell

Both of these things are compatible with the Unix Philosophy™, and thus said Philosophy is nowhere near collapse. Rusty around the edges, sure, and maybe with some asbestos in the ceiling tiles, but certainly renovatable.

The philosophy is already prevalent in the world of "microservices"; an application is split into a whole bunch of independent (usually containerized) programs communicating via something like JSON over HTTP.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#82

Post by pjmlp »

favorited wrote: post #79
pjmlp wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

ANSI C and POSIX aren't the same thing.

POSIX is more like the extended runtime that C needs to be portable outside UNIX walls, which isn't being fully implemented on iOS and Android.

http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~vatlidak/resources/POSIXmagazine...

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#83

Post by forgotpwtomain »

malcolmgreaves wrote: post #67
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.

> 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.

You wouldn't consider it to be immature to not do the right thing just because it was communicated in an unpleasant way that a 'self-respecting person' should have disdain for? I'm not talking about this particular article or defending immaturity, - I just don't see how your position is any better; more so it's just as unhumble as the 'rockstar position' since you would apparently be willing to write worse code just to avoid learning from someone that's an asshole.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#84

Post by AceJohnny2 »

Koshkin wrote: post #68
haberman wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh the days without process isolation and memory management.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#86

Post by gpawl »

vacri wrote: post #58

> [shell] It becomes especially bad when we try to develop in it, as it’s not a full-fledged programming language. Who the hell 'develops' in shell? It's a glue language, not a development language. I've never heard anyone say "We're a shell shop".

It's a glue language, but it's still painful when you write a shell script.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#88

Post by Arizhel »

pjmlp wrote: post #49

"We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy." Rob Pike 2004, h…

>while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy.

The problem here is that there aren't a lot of alternatives. You could use Windows, which is like listening only to music by MC Hammer, or you could use a Mac, which is like listening only to music by Duran Duran.

Because of software/backwards compatibility concerns, and how dependent everything is on the underlying OS, it's really hard to change anything in the OS, especially the fundamental design. It'd be nice to make a clean-sheet new OS, but good luck getting anyone to adopt it: look at how well Plan9 and BeOS fared.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#89

Post by forgotpwtomain »

Aloha wrote: post #19

Unix 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.

Have you tried the alternatives? They all suffer from various problems. e.g. I use fish but still write bash scripts for production systems - more so fish is perhaps too safe in being too close to POSIX for the improvements to make a great difference (vs the pains of breaking compatibility). Powershell? You might as well write python or ruby at that rate..

What I mean to say is that while there has been a lot of initial inertia from the previous technologies that make it hard to change, it's also true that the new technologies have failed to make large enough gains to warrant the pains of changing - this is precisely the demise of Plan9: it's not that it wasn't better it just that it wasn't better enough to warrant the huge expense of replacing old, working systems.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#90

Post by pjmlp »

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…

> because Unix is from the early 70s, which were a very different time in computing & culture.

Lisp, Smalltalk, Mesa, Pilot OS and Xerox Development Environment are from the early 70s as well (Lisp even earlier).

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