yawn
Please don't do this here.
The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
301–310 of 616 posts
Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#302I do think we lost of the "do one thing and do it well" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
Part of it is that it's way more annoying to maintain a little tool than to make it part of a bigger project with a much bigger community, it's also far harder to discover than just being in the docs a bigger project
Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#303This 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.
it's a joke. Last sentence of the article is > The provocative tone has been used just to attract your attention.
Yes, anything funny (even absurdist humor) is predicated on a kernel of truth. Quite odd, then, that the article contains so little well informed opinion and even less humor.
Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's hard to believe this came from a place of humor after reading the otherwise dry article.
It's your prerogative to follow trends to determine what you find worthy of your time or not, but it's not a good thing to suggest that anyone that tolerates that type of language better than you do or even enjoys it, lacks self respect. A lot of people find that cockiness funny and find the informality welcoming. And many of those tend to find cold formality, fake humility or lack of self-confidence as signs of some…
That's fair. I'll admit that he may be writing to an audience very different than myself.
The edit was because I only ended up scanning what I intended on reading and felt the second part of my criticism overly harsh.
Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#305"We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy." Rob Pike 2004, h…
Further evidence that Rob Pike is a second-rate engineer and a lousy writer.
Hm? I mean I don't know how one could think that and spearheaded go, but that paragraph seems reasonable to me.
Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Intiertia among developers. Also since when is Apple know for their software architectural decision-making lol.
Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yes, yes, yes. I'm saddened that tabs have essentially 'lost' - they seem to me in every way superior to spaces, but I would never use them in a new project simply because it would be likely to throw off others, and perhaps tooling. Github, for example, does not play nicely.
Spaces are superior to tabs in only one (important) way: They're a constant width.
Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#308Everyone 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…
The famous "each tool does just one thing well" mantra is also a depressingly overblown myth. Among the current Unix tools, there is a ridiculous amount of overlap. That's why we have both "ls" and "find", even though they do the same thing conceptually. "ps" has column output, but the way it formats, sorts, selects etc. columns is reinvented and not transferable to other tools such as "lsof" and "netstat", not to me…
Powershell did one thing wrong, in that its tools emit objects, not data. In other words, they emit data with behavior (methods). This, in turn, imposes the CLR object and memory model on the whole thing, and makes the pipeline impossible to use between distinct processes.
The right way to do this is to pick some reasonable text-based structured interchange format - s-exprs, JSON, whatever. Actually, it wouldn't be a bad thing to have a binary protocol as well, so long as all that complexity is negotiable, and is implemented by the standard library.
Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#309"We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy." Rob Pike 2004, h…
He said that because back then he was working on a new OS. This was PR.
And why do you think he was working on a new OS, instead of improving Unix?
Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
The famous "each tool does just one thing well" mantra is also a depressingly overblown myth. Among the current Unix tools, there is a ridiculous amount of overlap. That's why we have both "ls" and "find", even though they do the same thing conceptually. "ps" has column output, but the way it formats, sorts, selects etc. columns is reinvented and not transferable to other tools such as "lsof" and "netstat", not to me…
Powershell did one thing wrong, in that its tools emit objects , not data . In other words, they emit data with behavior (methods). This, in turn, imposes the CLR object and memory model on the whole thing, and makes the pipeline impossible to use between distinct processes. The right way to do this is to pick some reasonable text-based structured interchange format - s-exprs, JSON, whatever. Actually, it wouldn't be…
Agreed. One huge benefit to a text format is that you can generate small "ad hoc" snippets (e.g. echo) easily. Otherwise I'd love something like Protocol Buffers here.