141–150 of 616 posts
"Taking into account the numerous mistakes of UNIX. However, no one raises Plan 9 on a pedestal." Suckless and cat-v.org would disagree. I'd also disagree since I'm a huge fan of plan9port.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
IMO you can take any modern distro and strip it down to something understandable. It just takes some time to learn how to strip it down and how what's left works (and this is ongoing, as things are always changing). I'm not saying it's trivial, but neither is learning how to rebuild a motorcycle.
IMHO, a lot of the Unix philosophy boils down to: we do it this way because the neckbeard of my father and the neckbeard of his father and all the neckbeards before him unto the beginning of Unix on January 1, 1970 did it that way and if you want to do it differently, well, you better have a stronger neckbeard, because then we'll have two problems instead of just one.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Windows 10 already sorted out the filename limitations. A few more releases and in around 10 years, Win32 will be drinking beers with Carbon. Mono and Qt don't change the architecture of UNIX and their adoption across UNIX variants isn't a game changer.
>Windows 10 already sorted out the filename limitations. No, it hasn't. Filenames are still case-insensitive (and in a terrible way, where it seems to remember how they were first typed but that can never be changed), backslashes are still used for path separators instead of escaping characters, and the worst of all is that drive letters are still in use, which is an utterly archaic concept from the days of systems w…
For us, Windows pathanmes are just fine.
As for Windows architecture, maybe you should spend some hours reading Windows Internals book series, BUILD and Channel 9 sessions about MinWin, Drawbridge, Picoprocesses, UWP, User Space Drivers, Secure Kernel,....
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Any free software OS can meet his requirements as they all are transparent to anyone with the time to learn, just like the older bikes. The problem with modern bikes is that all the advanced tech is proprietary and you have no way of understanding it or tinkering with it. IMO you can take any modern distro and strip it down to something understandable. It just takes some time to learn how to strip it down and how wha…
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…
The terminal is responsible for hacks upon hacks: Colors, ncurses, signals, and whatnot.
I 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.
Every time there's a post like this it's all about performance!, performance!
I like UNIX not because of any technical reason, but because it's easy for a human to use.
Linux and UNIX are not meant to be "perfect" from a CS standpoint. They're meant to be easy for people consumption. I can't read a binary format. I can read text.
That is the real point of the UNIX philosophy, IMO. Do one thing, do it well. Trying to solve too many problems at once will bite you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not true. Windows in particular is greatly limited by past design choices, such as filename limitations, the security model, the fact that many programs have to be run as administrator because that's how they were written years ago, etc. There's nothing preventing you from running different language runtimes and such on Linux/Unix systems; people do it all the time. Have you not noticed Mono? It's been around…
Windows 10 already sorted out the filename limitations. A few more releases and in around 10 years, Win32 will be drinking beers with Carbon. Mono and Qt don't change the architecture of UNIX and their adoption across UNIX variants isn't a game changer.
Only for new applications. These written for the old ABIs still trip over after the 240th character, even though the FileSystem supports much more.
To put in another words: I belive the inherent unix limitations (process model for terminals, process signalling, lack of structure) are still less limiting than DOS assumptions about the consumer hardware and applications of the 80's.