201–210 of 616 posts
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.
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...
So yeah, any of that would be a much better idea than unstructured text, and yes, you can serialize all those use cases into trees. I'd steer away from XML for sake of efficiency and human-readability though.
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.…
To 1: Computers are for humans. I like my configurations to be accessible to me, as well as my logs.
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
(Three versions of NT have been leaked; NT 4.0, Windows 2000, an the Windows Research Kit (which is Win2k3) -- they are all trivial to find online (first page of Google results).)
That was a sad thing to read, the author is so clueless they don't even know when the reasons they imagine something might have been broken are wrong. Back when UNIX was born the character was a first class citizen in every computer on the planet, and many languages used it as part of their syntax. Static binaries were invented when Sun and Berkeley co-developed shared libraries and there needed to be binaries that y…
— Stuart Feldman
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.
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 e…
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.
Symbolics Genera doesn't pass S-expressions (i.e. text) between processes, it passed objects. Everything runs in a single address space so this is cheap and accurate. Also, ZetaLisp and Common Lisp have way more types than those supported by S-expressions. For example, they have real vectors/arrays, structures, and full objects. Don't assume all of the Lisp world uses just the subset of Scheme used in the first coupl…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
IIRC, the original (1969) version of UNIX was designed to run on a computer with 24 kilobytes of RAM.
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.
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.
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 e…
What I don't like about that attitude is that it suggests that the blogpost should be excused from criticism of its rigor. But any assertion and opinion by anyone can and should be considered open to criticism.
> "But no, the author has no responsibility to provide you with a comprehensive list of citations and references."
Of course he is not responsible. But if someone expects or wants people to be convinced of their argument, then prefacing with his rude dismissal does not help.
A better way than "This article was written hastily, and I don’t want to further improve it. You’re lucky I wrote it." without the unnecessary rudeness and ego boosting could be more along your lines: "This article was written hastily and shouldn't be subject to PhD-thesis-level scrutiny, so I've posted without any expectation that I will improve it or respond to criticism."