Earlier quoted context omitted.
The arguments in the article indeed don't have much to say about Unix Philosophy per se - they're just a list of various fuckups and idiocies Unix accumulated for some reasons or others. As for Unix Philosophy, the point (3) in your summary is something that's a) dumb, and b) back when it was created, they already had better solutions. Passing text streams around is a horrible idea because now each program has to hav…
> "The arguments in the article indeed don't have much to say about Unix Philosophy per se - they're just a list of various fuckups and idiocies Unix accumulated for some reasons or others." Right. The title should have been reflective of that "Various idiocies Unix has accumulated to this day" but since the article mentions Unix Philosophy, my point is that the article should have criticised the philosophy and not t…
It wasn't ahead of its time. By the time Unix was created, people were already aware of the benefits of structured data.
> it automatically takes advance of multiprocessor systems, without having to rewrite the individual components to be multi-threaded.
That's orthogonal to the issue. The simple solution to Unix problems would be to put a standard parser for JSON/SEXP/whatever into libc or OS libraries and have people use it for stdin/stdout communication. This can still take advantage of multiprocessor systems and whatnot, with an added benefit of program authors not having to each write their own buggy parser anymore.
> but the benefit of having a standard universally-agreeable input and output format is the time it saves Unix operators who can quickly pipe programs together. That saves more total human time than gained from potential performance benefits.
I'd say it's exactly the opposite. Unstructured text is not an universally-agreeable format. In fact, it's non-agreeable, since anyone can output anything however they like (and they do), and as a user you're forced to transform data from one program into another via more ad-hoc parsers, usually written in form of sed, awk or Perl invocations. You lose time doing that, each of those parsing steps introduces vulnerabilities, and the whole thing will eventually fall apart anyway because of million reasons that can fuck up the output of Unix commands, including things like your system distribution and your locale settings.
As an example of what I'm talking about, imagine that your "ls" invocation would return a list of named rows in some structured format, instead of an ASCII table. E.g.
((:columns :type :permissions :no-links :owner :group :size :modification-time :name)
(:data
(:directory 775 8 temporal temporal 4096 1488506415 ".git")
(:file 664 1 temporal temporal 4 1488506415 ".gitignore")
...
(:file 755 1 temporal temporal 69337136 1488506415 "hju")))
ls | filter ':modification-time git_perms_audit.log
BTW. This is exactly what PowerShell does (except it sends .NET objects), which is why it's awesome.