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The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

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Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#551

Post by dang »

jstimpfle wrote: post #393
TeMPOraL wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not converting to "one single format", it's converting to "any and all possible formats", because with unstructured text, you're literally throwing away the structure and semantics inherent in the data, instead relying on users to glue things together with ad-hoc parsers.

Please stop spreading bs. It's not throwing away structure. Piping text doesn't even preclude sexps. It's just that they are seldom needed. Simpler encodings like space-separated are sufficient for many use cases, and better for interoperation. It's misguided and inefficient to encode everything in the same way. Would you prefer to have your JPG or MP4 encoded in sexps? And I say that as someone who is working on a s…

> Please stop spreading bs.

This breaks the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Please edit out such bits. This would be a fine comment without it.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#553

Post by justin66 »

1_2__3 wrote: post #265
pjmlp wrote: post #49

"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.

Wrong. He was working for Google and becoming reacquainted with Linux at the time he said that.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#554

Post by paulddraper »

adrianN wrote: post #371
paulddraper wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bam-bam-bam-bam. Sorry can hear you over all the whitespace I have to type.

Every editor worth its salt does this for you. Maybe try upgrading from ed.

"This is a good decision because we've forced every editor to handle this good decision well."

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#555

Post by DharmaPolice »

pdimitar wrote: post #513
DharmaPolice wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Are those actual arguments?

Well I'm not attempting to convince anyone of anything so no, not really. Merely my observations on a topic I find interesting. There are many things where I think there is a correct answer worth campaigning for, but folders vs directories is not one of them. It's a bit like whether you say "soda", "pop" or "coke", this might reflect where you come from [1] but that isn't an argument that one of the terms is right or wrong.

My comment was indeed full of subjectivity which was intentional - apologies if I didn't make that clear up front.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/12/soda-vs-pop_n_21037...

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#556

Post by teddyh »

jstewartmobile wrote: post #421
teddyh wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

If you have to run “eval” on it, it’s not an s-expression. If the “eval” is implied, what you are describing is serialization of data, not actual data.

You could do what you describe with JSON too – it’s just encoding and decoding. Would you therefore be able to claim that JSON is capable of transmitting, say, tabular data? Of course not.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#557

Post by kbenson »

smitherfield wrote: post #539
moosingin3space wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally have never heard Rustaceans defend poor design choices like that before.

I'm prefacing this by saying I think Rust is a very well-designed language, and AFAIK the best-designed language that currently exists in its problem space. Nevertheless there are aspects I'd consider design flaws and that fans have been known to dismiss with hand-waving or condescending lectures about type theory. That's a human problem, very much not a problem with the Rust community; in particular I'm quite impres…

> It's simultaneously ugly, verbose and cryptic.

> All the `.iter()` and `.iter_mut()` is verbose and could easily be inferred from context ... If it truly must be explicit — and allowing implicitness as an option doesn't preclude allowing explicitness as well — then introduce new method call operators to go along with the dot operator.

When you design your language based on feel on not based on principles that guide what should be defaulted to, you end up with a language that fits only very specific people. Designing based on principles allows people to learn the principles and then use intuition to guide them to in the direction of the correct feature or solution.

You pointed out the list is inconsistent. In my experience, when people have inconsistent feeling a about something that was designed with a consistent methodology, that's because they haven't yet grasped or accepted that methodology and are trying to shoehorn their ideas from other systems into it without recognizing there may already have been a very conscientious decision made about exactly those issues, and likely with more information to base the decision on.

> Rust should've been designed with C++ binary compatibility as a first-class goal. Yes, this is very difficult, and would require compromising aspects of the language design. But it would be an enormous boon to Rust's adoption rate

There are plenty of languages that sacrifice in the name of adoption. Too much and it's useful in the short term, but a losing proposition in the long term. Too little and you may never see enough adoption for it to matter (barring other sources of adoption).,

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#558

Post by narag »

btschaegg wrote: post #384
narag wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with a lot of what you wrote. It's true that there is a "keep it for the elite" mindset in the back of many programmers' mind. For years at forums I've seen that while I tried hard to explain basic concepts to newbies, others were happier with the RTFM answer. Still I'm not so sure that UNIX (or programmers) is the source of it. I started with DOS (later Windows) and TP (later Delphi) so please don't think I'…

I'd guess that much of this depends on who's writing the software. FOSS was (and still is to a great degree) driven by "nerds" in their spare time. If there's no Steve Jobs that smacks programmers about for neglecting the user experience for non-technical users, it won't make much progress. At other places (say Redhat) there's no big need to focus on non-technical users for business reasons when it comes to much of d…

I've only owned a Mac and honestly I hasn't found it really better. Actually I was surprised to find there are unsolvable user hostility problems like font size. For most Windows annoyances there were usually some registry key that you can touch.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#559

Post by rbanffy »

btschaegg wrote: post #522
rbanffy wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In FORTRAN 77, it'a syntax error to put a statement before column 7

Interesting! Can you explain why that is the case? Were the first 6 characters reserved for the line number or goto marks?

Yes. Columns 1 to 5 are for labels. Column 6, if it has any character there (usually "$"), marks a continuation from the previous line.

I think the column 6 rule and line continuations were removed for FORTRAN 95.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#560

Post by mulmen »

hprotagonist wrote: post #540
mulmen wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To clarify, using three easy outs instead of the right tool is kind of like saying config files are flawed because they have to be edited. Tools are created for a job and it is up to us as engineers to use them properly.

i should really say the PO who stripped the engine bolts with a phillips head instead of a JIS driver made it kind of inevitable. 40 year old machines are interesting.

Most of the screws I have seen are trashed from people using screwdrivers instead of impact drivers. Even with the proper JIS bit the screws will still be ruined if you don't use an impact type tool. There's just no way to apply enough axial force to the fastener with a normal hand tool, even if the shape is correct.
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