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The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

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Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#161

Post by eatonphil »

nickbauman wrote: post #144
mastax wrote: post #100

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.

I've used OpenBSD in the past and found it much simpler than Linux. But didn't always support what I needed to do. These days I'm doing less but doing it better.

> These days I'm doing less but doing it better.

On Linux or OpenBSD?

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#162

Post by squeaky-clean »

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.

it's a joke. Last sentence of the article is

> The provocative tone has been used just to attract your attention.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#164

Post by czep »

A lot of the author's criticisms are about UNIX utilities not gracefully handling filenames containing special characters. But seriously, who puts a newline in a filename? Instead of wasting time writing scripts that meticulously handle all possible edge cases, I'd much rather fix whatever broken process is putting control characters into file names.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#165

Post by braveo »

moosingin3space wrote: post #131
CalChris wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds just like Rust as well.

Literally have never heard Rustaceans defend poor design choices like that before.

You mean the way they defend some of the numerics in rust?

yeah, totally have never seen that...

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#166

Post by rocqua »

teddyh wrote: post #148
jstewartmobile wrote: post #124

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.

S-expressions are very nice, and have the unequalled property of being simple enough to serve as a syntax for an entire programming language, but as a data type it is at best on the level of JSON. If one were to design a new data format for pipes, I would hope one would aim a little higher than that. Going from plain text lines to JSON or sexps would simply not be worth the infrastructure retooling.

What lies above JSON or S-expressions, XML? Or some binary format?

If I had to guess, I'd say the issue with JSON and the like is how to deduce types (and the limited types available) combined with the issue of special characters in names and strings.

XML goes a long way towards fixing that, but at the cost of a lot of extra bloat. A binary format with a nicely defined header might work, but those formats tend to not be so good about inserting stuff.

There is something to be said in favor of plain text. If all solutions suck, go for the simplest and most flexible solution.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#167

Post by tinus_hn »

SSLy wrote: post #152
pjmlp wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complaints of a UNIX refugee on Windows. 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,....

>you should spend some hours reading Windows Internals book series I'd love to read the source code myself to see how it works instead

You can check out ReactOS which works like Windows but is open source.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#168

Post by rsync »

rocqua wrote: post #160
rsync wrote: post #154

I think it's very telling that the author consistently refers to directories as "folders". All of UNIX makes perfect sense if you are using UNIX for UNIX. If you're doing other things, like abstracting to "folders" and so on ... I am open minded and can see where it starts to fall apart a bit. But I use UNIX for the sake of UNIX ... I am interested specifically in doing UNIX things. It works great for that.

What then are "UNIX things". This could be either a no-true-Scotsman, or a tautology. To solve this, you'd need to specify what UNIX is good at.

"This could be either a no-true-Scotsman, or a tautology."

It's even worse!

I am saying that working in terminals, with strings of text and non-binary-format config files ... and all of the tools built around that ... is an end in itself.

Every single "broken" example in the OP is something that I find non-remarkable and, in fact, makes perfect sense to me.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#169

Post by tinus_hn »

jstewartmobile wrote: post #124

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.

The main advantage is of course that the system provides apis for using the registry and all programs use them. But another is that the format does not provide for comments. This means that it is easy to automatically manipulate unlike the unix text files.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#170

Post by vram22 »

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…

Interesting comment. Got to say I agree with the direction of it, to some extent - stable and powerful over newfangled and weak / unstable / buggy / done for glory rather than substance.

Do you know about the Royal Enfield Bullet [1] from India?

It is not at all as technologically sophisticated as the bikes you mention and others, but it is a fantastic bike to ride.

They are selling it in the West, too, from some years. Originally from the Enfield company, UK, then was manufactured in India for many decades (maybe starting around WWII), as the same standard model. Then a decade or more back, the new managing director invigorated the company with better quality, newer models, higher engine capacity (cc) models (like 500 cc), etc. - though I would not be surprised that some fans prefer the old one still - maybe me too, except not ridden it enough, I rode a 250 cc Yezdi much more - also a great bike, almost maintenance free, a successor to the classic Ideal Jawa bike from Czechoslovakia, and also made in India for many years. Yezdi was stopped some years ago, last I read, but the Bullet is still going strong and even being exported, a good amount, to the West.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Enfield_Bullet

https://www.google.co.in/search?q=royal+enfield+bullet

A Swiss guy, Fritz Egli (IIRC), was/is a fan and modified some of them (Bullets) over there. It was the subject of a magazine article.

I first rode a Bullet in my teens. A real thumper.

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