The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy • Hacker News Board

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#91

Post by nickbauman » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 9:48 PM UTC

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 A great deal of it is outdated or simply wrong, but it does have a running theme of a prediction that has largely been borne out: people assuming that all Unix's flaws are actually virtues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 love motorcycles too. I've owned many sophisticated bikes: Ducatis with their strange Desmodromic heads. With the ability to dial an exchange of torque to horsepower at the handlebars. Buells with their fuel-in-frame chassis. My current Suzuki even has 4 sensors in the airbox alone. One that measures the air input pressure. One that measures the oxygen level. One that measures the air temperature. Really amazing performance. It will be in a junkyard within ten years though. I won't be able to find those sensors in a few years.

So all that new and advanced technology doesn't really interest me anymore. I'm looking for a 1969 Honda CL350 right now. They're still around and running fine. They're much simpler and much more maintainable. No Engine Computer. No sensors. Everything really easy to understand.

I kinda want my OS like that too. With all its warts I can keep it running.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#92

Post by jstimpfle » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 9:48 PM UTC

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…

Totally agree. The article doesn't show deep understanding of the actual problems.

- make's TAB "problem" as very first argument is not very convincing.

- The citations to back up the claim that a (possibly binary) registry database was better than small text files are just not backing up. There is nothing to defend a registry there. The quote is about fsync semantics which has nothing to do with registry. Btw. in my perception it's a widely accepted fact that a big-pile-of-crap database is a bad idea. And oh, I haven't ever heard of any problem with passwd/group/shadow/gshadow being text files. And if there were, the access method is actually abstracted away, it's easy to switch backends to something else (NSS). (there is a problem with these files though -- they are denormalized, and not all fields have clear meaning and some programs interpret some fields in weird ways.).

- Zombie processes. What's the problem there? They are just like file handles. Handles have to be closed before they are garbage collected. The actual problem is that you can't really "open" and "close" processes, only spawn new childs and the resulting hierarchy is not typically desired.

- "We call touch in the loop! This means there is a new process for each file. This is extremely inefficient." Yeah and why exactly is the shell to blame that you use touch in a loop? (apart from the fact that it's almost certainly not a problem).

Could go on but have to leave...

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#93

Post by 7952 » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 9:48 PM UTC

lisper wrote: post #29

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…

Political parties present an abstract view of how society works that simplifies the complexity of the underlying system. It offers a set of interfaces that allow a large mass of untrusted individuals to influence the whole.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#94

Post by __jal » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 9:49 PM UTC

richardwhiuk wrote: post #42

__jal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What would you name 'grep' instead? Yeah, I found that one an especially weird gripe. Grepping was a new thing, so we needed a word for it. 'Grep' is short, easy to say and type, and relatively hard to confuse with similar words in the domain. Works for me. I can unfortunately imagine a modern startup implementing it, and shudder at potential names my imagination is coming up with... Searchlr, the best way to searc…

search?

So how do you know what type of search you're doing? There were existing text matching algorithms at the time.

"No, I mean the kind of car that is really big, that you drive on ice rinks to smooth out the ice."

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#95

Post by dllthomas » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 9:50 PM UTC

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".

I spent a year working on ~80k lines of bash. It was an interesting experience.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#96

Post by Arizhel » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 9:53 PM UTC

int_handler wrote: post #69

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."

This is incorrect. People did indeed think appendices were just useless throwbacks for a long time, but more recently the medical community recognizes their usefulness. They're basically like a first-level bootloader for the GI system, used to store bacteria in case of a severe illness like cholera or dysentery. It also serves some other immune functions. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appendix_%28anatomy%29#Functio...

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#97

Post by radiowave » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 9:53 PM UTC

This is just beautiful: "Standard utilities provide the output in the form of a plain text. For each utility, we actually need a parser of its own."

(More people would probably have read the Unix Haters Handbook if it was as pithy as this.)

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#98

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 9:54 PM UTC

Arizhel wrote: post #88

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 so…

The thing is UNIX, by definition, is never going to move beyond its original design, meaning POSIX + C.

Whereas Mac OS, Windows, iOS, Android, ChromeOS have moved into more productive language runtimes, with rich frameworks, improving safety across OS layers, even if they have a few bumps along the way.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#99

Post by TheRealDunkirk » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 9:54 PM UTC

Arizhel wrote: post #88

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 so…

> which is like listening only to music by Duran Duran

You say that like it were a bad thing.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#100

Post by mastax » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 9:56 PM UTC

nickbauman wrote: post #91

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 love motorcycles too. I've owned many sophisticated bikes: Ducatis with their strange Desmodromic heads. With the ability to dial an exchange of torque to horsepower at the handlebars. Buells with their fuel-in-frame chassis. My current Suzuki even has 4 sensors in the airbox alone. One that measures the air input pressure. One that measures the oxygen level. One that measures the air temperature. Really amazing pe…

What OS would be analogous to the Honda in your example? OpenBSD? Plan9?

Not Linux, surely. That would be more like the Suzuki, but it used to be an older bike so they left the carburetor in there and next year someone will add an electric motor too.