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The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

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Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#511

Post by Arizhel »

duncan_bayne wrote: post #336
Arizhel wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incorrect. People did indeed think appendices were just useless throwbacks for a long time, but more recently the medical community recognizes their usefulness. They're basically like a first-level bootloader for the GI system, used to store bacteria in case of a severe illness like cholera or dysentery. It also serves some other immune functions. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appendix_%28anatomy%29…

That common opinion is odd, in hindsight. Natural selection ought to quickly do away with an organ that served no purpose but to occasionally kill one of the luckless organisms that possessed it. It should have been obvious that it was doing something else, or more specifically, that the gene(s) for "having an appendix" were.

Did you miss the part about it being helpful for restoring GI function after a bad disease? Things like dysentery and cholera were pretty common before modern times. An organism that can recover from diseases like this is going to live longer and pass on its genes more often. The downside of it occasionally causing appendicitis and killing the organism is likely a small risk in comparison: how often did people in pre-modern times (before they knew what it was and had the ability to do surgery to remove it) die of appendicitis? Not very often. It wasn't the main killer of people by a very long shot. But people got sick all the time from various things that affected the GI system.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#512

Post by Arizhel »

zvrba wrote: post #357
nxc18 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows NT (the core OS) suffers none of those problems. The Windows (Win32) environment suffers those limitations. It also suffers 20+ years of strong binary compatibility, broad hardware support, and consistent reliability that systems of similar class (e.g. Linux desktops) can't match. If it makes you feel any better, drive letters are a convenient illusion made possible by the Win32 subsystem; NT has no such conc…

> The fundamental architecture of Windows, the kernel, hasn't changed in ages because it doesn't need to; it is far more sophisticated than UNIX will ever be and far more sophisticated than you will ever need. Another case in point: it allowed MS to write a layer on top of the NT kernel to run unmodified Linux binaries. (Windows subsystem for Linux).

Linux has the same thing, called WINE. It already works quite well, and if they had access to the Windows and Win32 source code and a staff of full-time developers, it'd work flawlessly.

An API translation layer doesn't prove that a kernel is "more sophisticated" than another; that's just fanboyism.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#513

Post by pdimitar »

DharmaPolice wrote: post #344
School-Cotton wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking not to make a point but because I genuinely don't have any clue: what is the distinction in your mind between a "directory" and a "folder", other than that latter term is more widely used in the Windows community?

In my mind (in the context of local file systems) the terms are basically the same although folders are usually objects that end users interact with. If someone says the "c:\windows\system32" folder or "/etc" folder I know what they mean but it sounds odd. Often though it just reflects how recently you started using computers (more than MS vs Unix). I predominantly work in Windows but I call them directories but then…

> but it sounds odd

> it just reflects how recently you started using computers

> sounds weird to me

Are those actual arguments? I am not sure the parent poster asked what you found "weird" or wanted you to imply you use computers for a long time.

For what is worth, I'd still prefer "mount point" or "access point" to both "directory" or "folder" when talking about remote systems. So I am not bashing you -- it's just that your comment is full of subjectivity.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#514

Post by Arizhel »

Someone wrote: post #184
SSLy wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Windows 10 already sorted out the filename limitations. Only for new applications. These written for the old ABIs still trip over after the 240th character, even though the FileSystem supports much more. To put in another words: I belive the inherent unix limitations (process model for terminals, process signalling, lack of structure) are still less limiting than DOS assumptions about the consumer hardware and appl…

You are moving the goal posts from OS limitations to limitations of old applications. Unix applications written using old assumptions (e.g. ?14? characters max for symbol names in libraries, ?16? bit address space, assuming the C library knows of gets ) can have problems on modern systems, too.

No one still uses Unix applications from the 1970s.

Lots of people still use Windows applications with the limitations mentioned here, either because they refuse to give up their 1990s Windows applications, or the weird little ISVs refuse to update their code.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#515

Post by jstimpfle »

pdimitar wrote: post #510
jstimpfle wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let’s begin with a teaser. How can we recursively find all the files with \ name in a folder foo? The correct answer is: find foo -name '\\\\' He doesn't know shell quoting (or has problems with the blogging software). It's '\\' and there is nothing wrong with that (-name accepts a pattern, not a fixed string) > How to touch all files in foo (and its subfolders)? At first glance, we could do it like this: find foo…

> Author is not proficient at shell > Partly because shell has some flaws, but more because of the insane amount of broken scripts and tutorials out there. So what are you saying then? Basically, "git gud"? I am struggling to find your exact argument here. I wonder if you keep saying "it's not broken, you're just using it wrong", or "you must be proficient and if you're not, it's nobody's fault", or what exactly? The…

I clearly said I'm not defending shell. Even when the author is responsible himself for wanting to put a fixed string where a pattern is expected.

But this is about text formats. Text is simple. It's only the overengineering farts who think they have to wrap everything in three levels of parens. It doesn't make a difference.

> Their fault? Absolutely and definitely. But it's the job of the tech to slap you through the wrist if you are not obeying to standards. Computers are not AI and they need protocols / standards. Are there standards in piping things between processes in UNIX/Linux? No.

I just don't get why people keep thinking just because it's "text" it's somehow not standardized (enough), or why putting things in parens would help.

Please, stop with this vague FUD. Give an actual example.

> Are there standards in piping things between processes in UNIX/Linux? No.

That's called separation of concerns. That the kernel doesn't care doesn't mean that the endpoints don't care.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#516

Post by gkya »

marcosdumay wrote: post #503
rbanffy wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Plan 9 is not "better enough". The other ones had fundamental non-technical problems that hurt their adoption (Plan 9 had those at the beginning too). Back to Plan 9, you can expect something that is just slightly better than your current options, and that keeps being this way to steadily gain adoption until it's popular. But that requires it being no worse than the current on any popular use case. Plan 9 may have a…

I'll say that if you could run a web browser on Plan 9 and maybe there was a POSIX or a Linux compat layer, it could've become popular. It'd be a boost to porting efforts if it was a usable desktop OS. Give me the best OS, but if I have to write a whole desktop/server stack on it to make use of it, I'll stick with what I have at hand.

A plethora of software is available for Unix and it's why it's here still. Had I the chance to switch to, say HaikuOS, without a big/complete productivity loss, I would.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#517

Post by nickpsecurity »

flukus wrote: post #298
nickpsecurity wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They thought about that. Claim it isn't as bad as you'd guess. Plus there's cheats like File Boxes. https://www.combex.com/tech/edesk.html

> Claim That's the keyword there. They don't actually demonstrate a lot of common apps and how the user is prompted. It sounds a lot like windows UAC with a default lock down. They don't even mention have permissions are permanently granted or not.

There's more detail in the Combex and E websites on how things work out. Honestly, it's too scattered for me to want to dig it out for you.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#518

Post by braveo »

moosingin3space wrote: post #229
braveo wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean the way they defend some of the numerics in rust? yeah, totally have never seen that...

What in particular are you referring to? I ask honestly, because this "my way or the highway" attitude has never been the Rust community's way.

Their approach to overflow, for one.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#519

Post by gkya »

whack wrote: post #125
wyclif wrote: post #14

This 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.

As an hobbyist blogger, I can perfectly empathise with why the author wrote that. People love to crap all over a blogger who dares to post his thoughts on a private blog, without first subjecting it to PhD-thesis-level scrutiny. This really gets on my nerves for the same reasons that engineers get pissed off when they decide to open source a pet project and suddenly start getting "URGENT ASAP" feature requests from e…

The best thing to do as a "hobbyist/private blogger", sth. which I do on-and-off too, is to not have a comment system. Saves so much hussle. If someone cares enough, they can write an e-mail, which you can later publicise if you (and the correspondent) like.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#520

Post by LordKano »

rbanffy wrote: post #428
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…

> 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…

I understand why they wonder but it should be a 10 minute thought exercise in most cases.

You have to define "better". Is it synonymous with "easier", "type safe", "less resource intensive", "object oriented", "functional", "faster" or some combination thereof.

How will you maintain backwards compatibility? Because, despite the fact that you may have just graduated, there are scripts and programs that rely on scripts that go back decades and people are NOT going to rewrite them just because of your new whiz-bang solution.

You may use it and if you represent a large enough organization, it might be viable for that use case but if you're only shopping a solution in search of a problem, you may as well not waste your time.

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