yawn
The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
121–130 of 616 posts
Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#122There 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…
> 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.)
I disagree, I think this is still the sweet spot between security and utility. Users have been trained to just click approve on any privilege escalation dialog.
Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What do you mean by unix in this context? Everything save for windows bears a strong kinship with Unix and every OS is more than capable of running additional runtimes and frameworks beyond C.
UNIX and C are symbiotic, regardless of whatever runs on top, only POSIX and C are common to any UNIX.
Windows roots are on VMS, not UNIX. There is hardly anything UNIX related on its architecture, regarding kernel design.
Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#124I wish Symbolics had a better run.
The Windows registry/powershell approach has the niceness of passing pieces of data instead of one big blob of text that has to be re-parsed at every step, but with the drawback of verbosity and fussy static typing.
Being able to directly pass s-expressions between between programs without the format/parse/typing hokey-pokey of Unix and Windows would be nice.
Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#125This 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.
As an hobbyist blogger, I can perfectly empathise with why the author wrote that. People love to crap all over a blogger who dares to post his thoughts on a private blog, without first subjecting it to PhD-thesis-level scrutiny. This really gets on my nerves for the same reasons that engineers get pissed off when they decide to open source a pet project and suddenly start getting "URGENT ASAP" feature requests from entitled users.
The author is taking the time to post his thoughts on a private blog. If you're not happy with the level of rigor, then don't read it, don't share it, and don't believe it. But no, the author has no responsibility to provide you with a comprehensive list of citations and references.
Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Ideally a simplified subset of YAML;
the full specification suffers from feature creep and has actual bugs.
Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#127I'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…
Windows did that, and look at the mess that got them into. Eventually they had to introduce UAC, essentially a simplified Unix-style permissions system.
Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
As a sibling comment points out, the submission actually quotes from Richard Gabriel's Worse is Better . That, and the snarky tone of the comment may have been what caused people to downvote and/or flag the comment. 'swolchok could also have linked to the original, thus avoiding jwz's HN-referrer redirect.
I know all that, but if reposts or not reading articles was deserving of censorship, there'd be quite a lot of [flagged] placeholders around here.
Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#129Earlier 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?
Search what? File names? File contents? Users? Machines?
Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#130This whole article is a bunch of strawman arguments. It points out historical mistakes by unix developers, but those mistakes aren't inherent to or a result of the Unix Philosophy:
(1) Write programs that do one thing and do it well.
(2) Write programs to work together.
(3) Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.