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The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

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Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#101

Post by jstimpfle »

yellowapple wrote: post #81

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…

One format for all use cases? Databases (passwd,group...), single-word files, key-value(-list?) files, rc files for a thousand programs?

Great idea! We should use XML for that...

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#102

Post by kps »

pklausler wrote: post #12

> I guess there wasn’t even Microsoft DOS at the time (I guess and I don’t bother to check, so check it yourself) 1969 < 1981.

Heck, in 1969 there wasn't even CP/M that MS-DOS was modelled after.

Heck, in 1969 there wasn't even RT-11 that CP/M was modelled after.

There was a brand new OS/8 that RT-11 was modelled after.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#104

Post by VintageCool »

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.

Heh. That reminds me of the article from last year that Apple was distributing many Unix programs as a single binary.

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2016/04/17/unprotected/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11517894

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#105

Post by Arizhel »

jondubois wrote: post #5

I think the problem is that Linux developers started abusing the Unix Philosophy to the point that you had to know about a lot of different programs in order to be productive - Sometimes, it's much more convenient if one program can do everything that you want it to do out of the box (it requires less understanding of the system). The Unix philosophy is essentially the opposite of the Apple philosophy. It gives you f…

Linux is not a monolithic system. It has a monolithic (sorta) kernel. There's a big difference. You're arguing monolithic kernels vs. microkernels. Microkernels didn't even exist when UNIX was invented, so no, they are not representative of "Unix philosophy". "Unix philosophy" is merely about the user-space tools you use to do stuff, since back in 1970 all they had was the shell (sh), and various tools like grep, ed, awk, etc., to do things.

It's entirely possible to have a microkernel with a Unix-like system; HURD attempts this. Microkernel vs. monolithic is an entirely separate issue.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#106

Post by camperman »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #99
Arizhel wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

It's OK at first but once you get beyond the shiny, it's quite limiting.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#107

Post by rwmj »

dllthomas wrote: post #95
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.

You must tell us more :-) For my anecdote, I know people who did 10k+ line final year university projects in AWK and Tcl respectively. The AWK one was a particular act of endurance.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#108

Post by yellowapple »

jstimpfle wrote: post #101
yellowapple wrote: post #81

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…

One format for all use cases? Databases (passwd,group...), single-word files, key-value(-list?) files, rc files for a thousand programs? Great idea! We should use XML for that...

I meant that more in terms of IPC (e.g. in pipes), but most of those use cases happen to be adequately handleable by YAML specifically, so yeah, why not?

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#109

Post by haylem »

mundo wrote: post #32
_cbsz wrote: post #4

Sounds like the author needs to read Worse Is Better ( https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html ).

^^^ Open incognito if you don't want to see jwz's NSFW salutations to HN readers...

Funny that the parent was flagged, even though the link is valid, and the parent's author is not at fault.

Oh! The beauty of censorship by the masses.

Now I can see why jwz would choose to take a stab at HN. He may be right, and even too kind.

That flag is just sad...

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#110

Post by rwmj »

metaobject wrote: post #78
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.

It's not even clear that for small password files, scanning /etc/passwd is any slower than a database. It's likely already in memory, and a full scan of a few kilobytes of text in highly optimized C is likely to take only microseconds.
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