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The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

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Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#421

Post by jstewartmobile »

teddyh wrote: post #390
jstewartmobile wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to use the same syntax for code and data is no small thing. This aspect alone puts it above JSON. That, and for most LISPS, S-expressions have a broader vocabulary than JSON (symbols, complex numbers, etc.).

JSON also has hash tables (which they confusingly call “objects”), which sexps do not. One may argue that one is or isn’t slightly better than the other, but the point was that they are very close.

S-expressions can express whatever the LISP can express (like Clojure's built-in hash table syntax), or the s-exp could just pass a lambda to generate the data on-the-fly at the next step, and since the lambda itself is a list, the receiver has an easy built-in facility for inspecting/altering/extending passed-in code.

JSON is just arrays, objects, bools, numbers, strings, and null.

How are they "close"?

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#422

Post by jstewartmobile »

sedachv wrote: post #333
jstewartmobile wrote: post #124

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.

> Being able to directly pass s-expressions between between programs without the format/parse/typing hokey-pokey of Unix and Windows would be nice. Genera did not have programs, it is all just function calls. There was a multi-user LMI Lisp machine that ran Unix concurrently, that used streams to communicate between the two Lisp and one Unix processors: http://www.1000bit.it/ad/bro/lmi/LISP-MachinePR_Photo.pdf Format…

How about:

Being able to directly pass s-expressions ... would be nicer than putting an alphabet soup of parameters on one program to have it output text in just the right way for the next program to re-parse it with another alphabet soup of parameters.

I'm not saying that this is the one true way. I'm just agreeing with the article that there is a lot of room for improvement in how things get piped and config-ed in *nix.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#423

Post by fredoliveira »

sehr wrote: post #87
nanodano wrote: post #45

"This article was written hastily, and I don’t want to further improve it. You’re lucky I wrote it. Therefore, I may provide some facts without source links." I guess I am lucky he wrote this for a pleb like me.

It's a joke though?

Doesn't read like one.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#425

Post by fao_ »

eikenberry wrote: post #337
SFJulie wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All systemd related processes (dbus, systemd-*, init, etc) running on my system are using < 25Mb of memory. So that is a bit excessive, even if exaggerating for effect.

It shouldn't even need that much though. All PID 1 should do is load the rest of the system.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#426

Post by walshemj »

sowhatquestion wrote: post #363
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…

> It always amazed me when someone looks at computer systems of the 70's through the lens of "today's" technology and then projects a failure of imagination on the part of those engineers back in the 70's True enough, but as a younger programmer, I find it pretty reasonable to look back at computer systems of the 70s and wonder if we can do better today . I feel a little bit gross every time I have to write a bash sh…

Plain text config files are lot easier to write and edit than XML or JSON - the KISS principle applies.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#427

Post by 192837821912 »

tnone wrote: post #401
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…

You know that thing about how old ideas in science can only really be replaced when their supporters die? Unix greybeards, this is about you.

Sure, but the follow-up systems would be worse. I haven't seen a single actual improvement in software in 10 years.

It's all churn and bloat.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#428

Post by rbanffy »

sowhatquestion wrote: post #363
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…

> It always amazed me when someone looks at computer systems of the 70's through the lens of "today's" technology and then projects a failure of imagination on the part of those engineers back in the 70's True enough, but as a younger programmer, I find it pretty reasonable to look back at computer systems of the 70s and wonder if we can do better today . I feel a little bit gross every time I have to write a bash sh…

> wonder if we can do better today

Cough... systems... cough...

We can do better. Plan 9 existed. Apple's Newton has a unique take on data files. AS/400's map all storage to memory addresses giving a single address space for everything. With Smalltalk, applications would just be new classes you import into your system.

The key to Unix's success seems to be not doing better, but doing as little as possible while still remaining useful.

And yes, it's a bit disappointing that, when we did better, we were less successful. Today, all the dominant OSs are children of either Unix or VMS.

And MVS, which went nowhere, but in the sense it's always been there and, it seems, always will be.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#429

Post by rbanffy »

inkyoto wrote: post #273
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…

The most important thing about UNIX - no matter how simplistic (or not) it might appear or how significant (or not) the perceived flaws might seem - is that a move to UNIX back in 70s-80s was liberating with its simplicity and human friendliness for so many of those coming the world of closed-off, proprietary operating systems, walled gardens, development tools and kernel API’s. Writing a mere string out to a file on…

I remember people saying Unix was the gold standard of user-hostile operating system.

That was well before I met AS/400 and MVS.

And then I had contact with a Burroughs A-series and it's appropriately named OS, MCP.

OTOH, I love the 3270s.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#430

Post by madmulita »

kbart wrote: post #370
sowhatquestion wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It always amazed me when someone looks at computer systems of the 70's through the lens of "today's" technology and then projects a failure of imagination on the part of those engineers back in the 70's True enough, but as a younger programmer, I find it pretty reasonable to look back at computer systems of the 70s and wonder if we can do better today . I feel a little bit gross every time I have to write a bash sh…

"if you couldn't justify something being designed a certain way de novo, why be content with the existing design!?" Please, no. Don't convert system programming/engineering to the mess that is web development today.

I'm sorry, Docker is already here, even in enterprisie flavor.
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