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The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

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Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#171

Post by busterarm »

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 A great deal of it is outdated or simply wrong, but it does have a running theme of a prediction that has largely been borne out: people assuming that all Unix's flaws are actually virtues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…

I did similar with cars, though I still have the ECU to deal with. Eventually I'll replace that with a Megasquirt, because I can repair/replace all the components and know how the whole system works.

When I thought I wanted a bike, I looked around for a Condor A350.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#172

Post by nickbauman »

eatonphil wrote: post #161
nickbauman wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Both

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#173

Post by busterarm »

eatonphil wrote: post #161
nickbauman wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Pretty sure he means OpenBSD and I'm in the same boat.

Also, Erlang and Elixir run out of the box on it, so it's suitable for nearly all of my personal projects.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#174

Post by hinkley »

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…

Occasionally when I run out of analogies for why convoluted systems are not 'flexible', I reach for a half-remembered homage, that I encountered as a teenager, about the Chevy Straight 6.

This was not a fancy engine. It was not a particularly powerful engine. Not a single thing on it or about it was exceptional. Because it was easy to work on and with add-ons and modifications it could be coaxed into doing things it wasn't really meant to do. It was just solid and got out of your way. So engineers and hobbyists tinkered and tinkered and got something over 2.5x the original horsepower out of the thing.

Unix commands might be solid, but the 'get out of your way' bit is what troubles me. People will lament otherwise good engines that are hard to work on because of a design flaw or the way they're laid out. Unix is falling down here. It's just that everyone else is at least as bad. But a guy can dream.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#175

Post by rocqua »

nine_k wrote: post #39
Aloha wrote: post #19

Unix as we know it is almost 50 years of accretion - sh/bash is a great example of this. I think the Unix philosophy is still sound and alive, but the movement of technology means not everything that was universal before, is now.

There's a recurring theme (e.g. [1] among many examples) of comparing the Unix Way to the way of functional programming. Both prefer small things that do one thing and compose well. What is missing in many cases is a concepts guide , explaining the key ideas, how to combine things, and what's possible in various subject areas. For GUI programs, menus / toolbars used to be the concept guide: what they show is what's p…

> For GUI programs, menus / toolbars used to be the concept guide

This simple fact seems like the key to getting the masses into computing. For something like 6 years (say 12-18) GUIs were the way I interacted with computers. Need to do something and learn about it? Go and explore the UI until you find the option. If the option has a shortcut printed, you will remember it eventually.

Sadly, GUI design is a quite separate discipline from software design. This means much open source software is missing GUIs. Those who write the software aren't always GUI designers. This also creates the mismatch between composing software and composing GUIs. As they are different disciplines, what it means to combine them means different things.

A decent stopgap is massive frameworking and standardization on GUI to make it easier for devs to get a GUI. To get the really good stuff, commercial entities have the best position. They need their stuff to be usable by everyone, and this finances the hiring of GUI people.

There is the rare gen of a developer that can also do GUI right, but that only has value in the case of small projects. When projects grow, unless all devs have the GUI knack, you're gonna need some dedicated GUI people.

It would be great if we could get more GUI-oriented people into open-source stuff but it seems like they aren't as attracted to open-source as devs are. It might be because devs can be at the ground floor of a project, and GUI, almost by neccesity, comes later.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#176

Post by sedachv »

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…

> It will be in a junkyard within ten years though. I won't be able to find those sensors in a few years.

Not true. You will be able to get an aftermarket ECU that can just ignore the sensors and run in open-loop mode. That will be exactly the same as running with carburetors: fixed fuel/air ratio that is almost always wrong. This is also the failure mode for OBDII cars - sensor failures lead to the ECU running in open-loop mode, which lowers MPG and increases emissions, which will eventually foul the catalytic converters.

> 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.

My wife has owned a CB175 and a CB550. Both required tons of work and were maintenance nightmares. They really are piece of shit bikes when it comes to reliability when compared to most Japanese bikes from 1990 onward. The prices old Honda bikes command on the market are completely out of whack with what you get because of strong demand from both the vintage bike enthusiast and hipster demographics. I would not ride one if it was given to me for free.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#178

Post by pdkl95 »

nine_k wrote: post #39
Aloha wrote: post #19

Unix as we know it is almost 50 years of accretion - sh/bash is a great example of this. I think the Unix philosophy is still sound and alive, but the movement of technology means not everything that was universal before, is now.

There's a recurring theme (e.g. [1] among many examples) of comparing the Unix Way to the way of functional programming. Both prefer small things that do one thing and compose well. What is missing in many cases is a concepts guide , explaining the key ideas, how to combine things, and what's possible in various subject areas. For GUI programs, menus / toolbars used to be the concept guide: what they show is what's p…

> concepts guide

"The Art of Unix Programming"

http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/

It's not perfect - I'd love to see a guide with more practical examples - but it does do a good job covering the basic philosophy and some of the history of why certain design decisions were made.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#179

Post by white-flame »

Some of my primary beefs with Unix, stated more concisely than the rambling article:

1) Text is for humans, and is generally incomprehensible to machines. Encodings, arbitrary config file formats, terminals, etc, are all piles of thoughtless one-off hacks. It's a horrible substrate for compositing software functionality, through either pipes or files.

2) Hierarchical directory structures quickly become insufficient.

3) The filesystem permission model is way too coarse grained.

4) C is a systems/driver/low-level language, not a reasonable user-level application or utility language.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#180

Post by Someone »

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

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/

Not exactly "you can get it if you want it", but not "you can't even get it over our dead body", either.

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