Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a joke though?
Doesn't read like one.
Would be commonplace in any banter with friends imo, normal affected brashness.
The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
571–580 of 616 posts
Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#572Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their approach to overflow, for one.
IIRC the reason not to detect overflow by default in release builds isn't any variant of "You Just Don't Get It", it's rather "yes we'd like to do that but unfortunately there is a trade-off with a significant runtime performance hit, so we don't, for now".
You misunderstand me, I think it's folly to have different behaviors based upon debug and release builds.
And they'll argue until they're blue in the face why it's a good "compromise", but it would have been better to do one or the other, not both.
Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#573Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Plan 9 had fundamental technical problems too. Like most of the systems of that time it was designed with small single-building kind of networks in mind and didn't offer any value once large planet scale networks came to life. Also everything could have being implemented on top of any unix system, but wasn't that interesting for anyone to bother.
Most of them were fixed in Inferno, but by then most stop paying attention.
To the point even on HN many seem to be unaware that the line ended on Inferno and not Plan9.
Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#574Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
Your stated reasons aren't valid. I think they ported Mozilla until 2002 (Russ Cox, maybe?). There was also a compat layer: APE. As a counter to your argument: a system that has little capability compared to the well-established alternatives, starts from nothing, yet takes over the world: Linux. I really believe there was no greater reason for Plan 9's failure to catch on (or at least it's ideas) than my peers not be…
I read the plan-9 papers and was excited to play with it. I had a .edu affiliation and it was still $500 for a tap eand license and a letter saying what you planned to do with it... or some such. I had no budget, so we used linux.
They did open it up eventually, after linux had quite the following. It it had been open/available it would have had a chance.
Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#575Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plan 9 had fundamental technical problems too. Like most of the systems of that time it was designed with small single-building kind of networks in mind and didn't offer any value once large planet scale networks came to life. Also everything could have being implemented on top of any unix system, but wasn't that interesting for anyone to bother.
Most of them were fixed in Inferno, but by then most stop paying attention. To the point even on HN many seem to be unaware that the line ended on Inferno and not Plan9.
Personally, I tend to slot Inferno closer to Java than to Plan9, even though I'm clear about the lineage. In that sense, the line of "real" operating systems ended at Plan9.
Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#576Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your stated reasons aren't valid. I think they ported Mozilla until 2002 (Russ Cox, maybe?). There was also a compat layer: APE. As a counter to your argument: a system that has little capability compared to the well-established alternatives, starts from nothing, yet takes over the world: Linux. I really believe there was no greater reason for Plan 9's failure to catch on (or at least it's ideas) than my peers not be…
I read the plan-9 papers and was excited to play with it. I had a .edu affiliation and it was still $500 for a tap eand license and a letter saying what you planned to do with it... or some such. I had no budget, so we used linux. They did open it up eventually, after linux had quite the following. It it had been open/available it would have had a chance.
It sounded fine the first time I heard it, but I don't buy the "it wasn't free and Linux was available" argument any more. If more Linux users had read the papers like you, and done so early enough, they might have had an aggregate influence on Linux's design when it was still malleable. A Plan9-like Linux would have been just as good as Plan9 eventually.
Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#577I'm sorry but I am not reading an article that says, "You're lucky I wrote it," in the first paragraph.
And from the comments, it sounds like I'm not missing much.
Author, don't treat your readers like idiots. I can guarantee some of them are much smarter and more experienced than you.
Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#578Everyone 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…
> That's why we have both "ls" and "find"
I don't get what you're trying to say.
"ls" lists files in a specific path while "find" searches for objects in a file system that match a specific query.
Are you sure you're not confused and somehow assuming that "does just one thing well" should mean "another tool must not accomplish anything that might be remotely achievable by misusing another tool"?
Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#579> [shell] It becomes especially bad when we try to develop in it, as it’s not a full-fledged programming language. Who the hell 'develops' in shell? It's a glue language, not a development language. I've never heard anyone say "We're a shell shop".
I spent a year working on ~80k lines of bash. It was an interesting experience.
Please consider spending some time to write a comment here or a blog post on this experience! I would be very interested to read it.
Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
#580Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a shining counterexample to your thesis: https://arstechnica.com/apple/2015/01/why-dns-in-os-x-10-10-is-broken-and-what-you-can-do-to-fix-it/ In almost all my experiences reimplementing established software in a commercial environment "building a better wheel" has met with failure. Or in the very least it took some time to get it back to a level of acceptable that our customers were happy with. This idea that…
Apple is in the vanguard of only one thing: marketing.
What a lame and supercilious comment.