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The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

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Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#231

Post by moosingin3space »

CalChris wrote: post #155
moosingin3space wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, if you don't get that someone else might see something as a flaw then perhaps you wouldn't understand that you may be defending a bad design choice. I use Rust. There's a bunch of things I do not like about Rust. Its macro language is nigh on unusable. A macro language should be an expedient; it should allow you to get textual things done, committing necessary atrocities along the way knowing that the result mu…

I never said Rustaceans don't see flaws or that they don't defend bad choices. But I've never seen someone say "if you don't think so, then you Just Don't Get It" or any variant thereof in the Rust community.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#232

Post by ebbv »

This is an absolute garbage tier article. What on earth is it doing on the HN front page? The author has no clue what he's talking about (and admits it several times) and makes many logical leaps (one time the author said Gnome should have used a registry, so UNIX configs are bad?) all over the place.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#233

Post by moosingin3space »

SFJulie wrote: post #216
eikenberry wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just remove systemd that is looking like an electronic injection that now requires 4Gb of RAM and a full OS to work and screaming for more.

I don't normally get into these, but this is blatantly false, I'm running systemd on multiple older/smaller computers like an OG Raspberry Pi and an old netbook, and I don't even notice its memory consumption.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#234

Post by TeMPOraL »

fnj wrote: post #211
TeMPOraL wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Doctor, it hurts when I do this." "So don't do it." The problem with filenames is just a symptom of the biggest problem of UNIX conventions - passing around unstructured text. Filenames should have one well-defined format (AFAIR kernel allows pretty much anything but the NULL character). That's it. For most applications, filenames should be opaque data blobs compared for binary equality. But because we're passing ar…

When the design was made, no one was considering pathology. We were all too invested in the wonder of making it all work to worry about people screwing around in crazy ways, let alone purposeful attacks. As long as everyone recognized that putting certain characters in pathnames was counter-productive, things worked fine. Nobody ever dreamed of putting a space character in a filename when they all came from a CLI bac…

> When the design was made, no one was considering pathology. We were all too invested in the wonder of making it all work to worry about people screwing around in crazy ways, let alone purposeful attacks.

I could buy this if not for the fact that back when UNIX was created, there were already better operating systems and sane solutions to those issues existed. It's more like that those aspects simply weren't really thought through, but instead just hacked together.

Contrary to what seems to be a popular opinion nowadays, UNIX wasn't the first real operating system, just like C wasn't the first high-level programming language. I knew I actually believed the latter, due to the way C/C++ many books were written. But no, in both the worlds of programming and operating systems, there already were better thought-out solutions. It's a quirk of history that UNIX and C ended up winning.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#235

Post by moosingin3space »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #192
flukus wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The capability model is much more flexible. See Combex's desktop or "PowerBox's" for how simple it can be gor users to maintain POLA. Older system doing it was KeyKOS on IBM mainframes. KeyKOS + KeySAFE was strong architecture.

Agree, and we're slowly seeing more "capabilities lite" functionality in Unix-like OSes.

I think the next step is a capability runtime OS with a kernel personality for Linux for backwards compatibility. Sort of the converse of what we're doing right now.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#236

Post by scribu »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #156

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…

IMO, the main takeaway from the article isn't that "those 70's developers lacked imagination", but that UNIX is far from perfect.

The author even states that UNIX was amazing when it came out, but that doesn't mean all its ideas make sense today.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#237

Post by flukus »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #199
flukus wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search what? File names? File contents? Users? Machines?

You could say the same about "mv". Move what? Files? File names? File parts? Users? Machines? Screens? There's always some default subject implied for every command name. For "find" it is files, for "search" it could have been text.

> You could say the same about "mv". Move what? Files? File names? File parts? Users? Machines? Screens?

Files, the base type that's consistent across all the basic commands (AFAIK).

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#239

Post by em3rgent0rdr »

j2kun wrote: post #228
em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But just because an idea is old doesn't mean it is necessarily bad. Some ideas like Unix Philosophy have stood the test of time. The fact that this statement was made in 2004 and that Unix is still going stronger 13 years later is proof.

Inertia is only proof of inertia.

Suggesting that Unix has been continuing just by inertia doesn't explain why Apple adopted Unix for macOS or why most newer computers nowadays run a Unix OS.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#240

Post by w8rbt »

I read once that the dd command (which stands for convert and copy) was not named cc because the compiler was already called that so they used the next letters in the alphabet.

NAME dd - convert and copy a file

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