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The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

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Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#251

Post by matt_wulfeck »

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…

Chuck I'm really glad you frequent HN. I love reading your comments and your insight is always valuable. -- A fan.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#252

Post by mulmen »

rangibaby wrote: post #249
mulmen wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maintenance "headaches" are part of the appeal of old bikes. It's much easier to learn how an internal combustion powered vehicle works on an old Honda bike than a new one, or on a new car. Compared to other bikes of their day these are very simple to maintain and they were designed from the start to be kept running by the average person. It really depends on what you are looking for in a bike. If enjoying turning a…

I used to share your opinion, but hours of searching for no longer-made parts and obscure wrench sizes and other tools that often simply don't exist anymore cooled my enthusiasm somewhat (fixing 1960s camera lenses)

All the fasteners I have seen are standard metric sizes, what speciality tools are you referring to? The side cover screws can be stubborn but even a Philips #3 with an impact driver ($20.00 at the pawn shop) pops them right off. Conversion kits to standard allen head screws are cheap, on the order of $50.00 for the whole engine.

There is a special nut on the oil spinner but that's the only specialty tool I can think of on the bike until you start actually disassembling the whole thing and you don't even have to remove it to do an oil service. I guess the shock/steering head adjuster is a specialty tool? But that was included with the bike so not hard to find either.

Parts can be a bit harder but since these things were so popular it's a lot easier than any other bike from 1969. Also the aftermarket is huge if you don't care about staying totally stock.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#254

Post by zzzcpan »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #234
fnj wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"But no, in both the worlds of programming and operating systems, there already were better thought-out solutions."

There were differently thought-out solutions, but not necessarily better or worse. Perhaps the issues they thought out didn't matter as much at the time and very unlikely to matter even a little bit today, and who knows how much they got wrong and much worse. It's very hard to speculate. But one thing I'm sure of is that these things cannot be really well designed from scratch and all the problems manifest only once they are used by people. So widely used systems can only be compared to widely used systems, not something niche or unused.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#255

Post by lojack »

mixedCase wrote: post #117
malcolmgreaves wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's such a problem with immaturity in tech. It's frustrating because it creates barriers to learning from others. No self-respecting person is going to want to learn from someone who has a "holier than thou" or "I'm a rockstar" mindset.

Contrary to your beliefs, one can have both self-respect and a sense of humor.

It's hard to believe this came from a place of humor after reading the otherwise dry article.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#256

Post by dpark »

diminoten wrote: post #246
dawidw wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a pity because of that tone I abandoned reading after few sentences and did't go to last sentence.

...and the world continued to spin. There's irony in people being insulted by arrogant tone and loudly proclaiming they stopped reading something.

I don't think there's anything ironic about dismissing the views of self-important assholes.

It may be that the author is not actually a self-important asshole, but starting an article like that makes it look like he likely is.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#257

Post by hprotagonist »

mulmen wrote: post #252
rangibaby wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to share your opinion, but hours of searching for no longer-made parts and obscure wrench sizes and other tools that often simply don't exist anymore cooled my enthusiasm somewhat (fixing 1960s camera lenses)

All the fasteners I have seen are standard metric sizes, what speciality tools are you referring to? The side cover screws can be stubborn but even a Philips #3 with an impact driver ($20.00 at the pawn shop) pops them right off. Conversion kits to standard allen head screws are cheap, on the order of $50.00 for the whole engine. There is a special nut on the oil spinner but that's the only specialty tool I can think…

did you have fun converting JIS to metric? I learned that one the hard way. Three EZ-Outs later...

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#258

Post by GalacticDomin8r »

rocqua wrote: post #183
rsync wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

To argue for the OP, consider the case of passwd being parsed on every system call. That is simply sub-optimal. (It also seems exaggerated to me, and feels like a prime candidate for caching). Further, there is an immense value in GUI based systems: discoverability. On a GUI, you can learn how to use a program without ever consulting a manual just by inspecting your screen. This addition is what brought the computer…

> To argue for the OP, consider the case of passwd being parsed on every system call. That is simply sub-optimal.

passwd is not read every system call and anything that is read frequently is almost certainly in the fs cache.

I got about 3 assertions into the article before I decided I had enough of that bullshit.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#259

Post by sedachv »

mulmen wrote: post #230
sedachv wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 op…

Maintenance "headaches" are part of the appeal of old bikes. It's much easier to learn how an internal combustion powered vehicle works on an old Honda bike than a new one, or on a new car. Compared to other bikes of their day these are very simple to maintain and they were designed from the start to be kept running by the average person. It really depends on what you are looking for in a bike. If enjoying turning a…

There is weekend wrenching and there is dealing with design flaws and poor manufacturing. Problems with the CB175 and CB550 that were not regular maintenance (carburetor/timing/valve/etc/etc) related:

* fast cylinder wear (poor materials/manufacturing, engine rebuilds all around)

* unreliable electric system ("mostly" fixed on CB550 with Charlie's solid state ignition and rectifier)

* Leaking gaskets (design flaw)

I know a lot of vintage Honda collectors and a few racers, and also a lot of vintage BMW collectors. BMW motorcycles from the same era do not have these problems.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#260

Post by ChuckMcM »

ploxiln wrote: post #241
rootbear wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had much the same reaction. I learned Unix on a PDP-11 running sixth edition AT&T. I was also using the University's UNIVAC 1108 and the elegance, simplicity and orthogonality of the Shell vs the EXEC-8 command language was a joy to behold. Sure, there is much about Unix that could be better and I sometimes regret that Plan 9 didn't succeed more. But it's like Kirk said to Saavik, "You have to learn WHY things work…

If you think about Makefile syntax being an earlier member of the same family as Python, the major difference is that tab may have been a more ubiquitous indent convention at the time (but I really don't know). I still prefer to indent C with tabs, and I'm not the only one. It's really not hard to handle tabs well, as a code editor or as a programmer. You can view them as whatever width you like. You can have marked…

One of the nice thing about indenting with actual tab characters is that you separate the notion of 'indentation' from the actual indentation. I set my tab stops to 4 which tightens the code, others set it to 8, still others set it to 2. If the code has tab characters it just works, if the code has spaces there is no way to have your most comfortable indentation level be used.
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