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The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

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Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#601

Post by duncan_bayne »

Arizhel wrote: post #511
duncan_bayne wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're uncharitably mis-reading my post, and being quite hostile in your reply.

What I meant was that - in hindsight - the fact that it had some beneficial function like restoring GI function should have been obvious, because otherwise, it would have been selected away.

That is, even a layperson _should_ have looked at the situation and thought "I bet it does something for us". But that's the benefit of hindsight; most (including myself) didn't. We just accepted the folk wisdom that it was useless.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#602

Post by cassowary »

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…

I don't think this is a fair criticism of the text.

However good Unix might have been in the 1970s, why am I still running it on my mobile phone? How good is it today? It seems that the major argument in its favor is legacy.

(Honestly, it seems to me that most of his criticisms could be moved away from stepwise. I'm guessing most of the configuration on my phone is stored in binary files. Someone could write the object-wise commandline utils he wants, and then create the architecture to make them more efficient. We could move there. Should we?)

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#603

Post by cassowary »

nickbauman wrote: post #144
mastax wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What OS would be analogous to the Honda in your example? OpenBSD? Plan9? Not Linux, surely. That would be more like the Suzuki, but it used to be an older bike so they left the carburetor in there and next year someone will add an electric motor too.

I've used OpenBSD in the past and found it much simpler than Linux. But didn't always support what I needed to do. These days I'm doing less but doing it better.

I've always found the problem with alt os's is that I have to pick my device to match the OS. I just want a small but adequately powerful laptop, so Linux is my only real choice.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#604

Post by cassowary »

narag wrote: post #558
btschaegg wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah... I've found Mac/iOS to be quite frustrating actually. Especially nowadays that their UI's a designed by designers who like things to be pretty — and you just can't change something no matter how bad it is (unless you want the touchpad to move the scrollbar instead of the page. they'll let you do that, even tho it's completely useless. they're not opposed to choice or flexibility, just opposed to ones that make things understandable or powerful at the expense of pretty).

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#605

Post by rusk »

theoh wrote: post #587
rusk wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a lame and supercilious comment.

Even the great Butler Lampson has a slide set online which includes the item Design (Apple's forté) This is arguably a slightly more defensible version of the GP.

I'm embarrassed to say I hadn't heard of him before now. Reading his Bio he does seem like something of a heavyweight!

I have some sympathy for our friend's point of view here, even if it is orthogonal to what I was saying. Particularly more recent developments but I have no time for this kind of snarky, pugnacious sniping.

I would suggest that Apple's real strength (or should I say Steve Jobs') was "Product Development" which yes includes a large component of marketing and I really don't see that as a bad thing. It's not like what was being marketed was a substandard product? People paid a premium and got a premium device.

That you don't get the same quality any more is no reason to decry the brand itself as only being good at marketing. Their devices are even today physically manufactured to the highest standards, but historically they have developed superbly engineered products. Yes this cannot be credited to Jobs, but he did identify and harness the talent.

This topic isn't black and white and perhaps there are many shortcomings to Apple, and to Jobs, but this kind of single-line snark does nobody any justice, in particular the commenter himself.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#606

Post by ghettoimp »

arpa wrote: post #543
ghettoimp wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it's certainly not the worst, and certainly can be used for many things, bash is definitely pretty damn bad. You've got horrible string escaping nonsense ($IFS, ...), an utter lack of any sensible types, constant incompatibilities due to command-line tools supporting different arguments on different platforms, ... While Perl or similar are not without many faults, at least they solve a lot of this. Think of eve…

You could use something like jq for parsing JSON. And while I agree with you regarding some of your points, they could be easily refuted by pointing fingers at other things: yes, string escaping can give a grown man nightmares, but hey, it's not working with strings in C; and once you get the hang of it, it is pretty simple. Lack of typing can hurt, sure - but it's not BASIC; With a little imagination you can have st…

I agree that CLI tools having different args on different platforms is certainly not bash's fault, but I think it hurts Bash much more than other languages because, since Bash is such a limited ("awful") programming language, the de-facto way of doing most anything in bash is to call out to these command-line tools for everything.

For instance, above you suggest using "jq" to parse JSON. I totally agree with you that if you actually needed to deal with some JSON data in Bash for some reason, then a tool like "jq" is definitely the way to do it, because it avoids trying to do actual programming in Bash.

In any "more reasonable" scripting language (perl/python/ruby/...), you can very easily open files, parse them, extract data, etc., all within the context of the language, without relying on all these external tools like awk/sed/grep/etc. And you have basic types like arrays and maps at your disposal that often make what you're trying to do a lot easier.

I can't imagine trying to actually write a JSON parser in pure bash. (Well, I can... but uggggh...)

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#607

Post by Arizhel »

duncan_bayne wrote: post #601
Arizhel wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're uncharitably mis-reading my post, and being quite hostile in your reply. What I meant was that - in hindsight - the fact that it had some beneficial function like restoring GI function should have been obvious, because otherwise, it would have been selected away. That is, even a layperson _should_ have looked at the situation and thought "I bet it does something for us". But that's the benefit of hindsight; mo…

Sorry, you're right, I misread your post. I think you have a good point here, but to be fair I don't think people weren't thinking in evolutionary terms at all. Not everything in our (or other animals') bodies are actually there for a good reason now. I'll give you one good example: horse toes. I don't remember the exact term now, but horses equine ancestors used to have multiple toes, like us and many other mammals. Now they just have one, with a big fingernail, called a "hoof". But if you look closely at the anatomy of their legs, you'll see some of the vestigial toes still there, serving no useful purpose now. Evolution isn't like engineering design, where we improve a design, see something that's not needed any more (like an automotive engine distributor), and just remove it entirely, and everything related to that, in one clean sweep, even mundane small things like bolt holes, and optimize the design for the new system (being coil-on-plug for this analogy). With evolution, it's slow and gradual. Another example is the recurrent sublaryngeal nerve in humans: this nerve apparently takes a rather bewildering and inefficient route, for seemingly no good reason, but when looked at from an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense why it takes that route. (The nerve itself is not vestigial and serves an important purpose, but the route it takes is very sub-optimal and could be called "vestigial" in a way.)

[1] http://www.thehorse.com/articles/34382/where-did-horses-extr...

[2] https://unzipyourgenes.wordpress.com/2011/03/24/unintelligen...

So I think it's entirely reasonable, in the absence of contradictory evidence, to use evolutionary thinking to make an argument that an anatomical structure seems to serve no purpose any more, just like those extra horse toes. Unfortunately, they were obviously wrong about the appendix, and I do think it's a little dangerous because the assumption of vestigiality rests upon the lack of evidence for the part having a modern use, but this can cause people to stop looking for that modern use, and then we wind up with what happened to the appendix, where it took a really long time to learn the truth because we assumed we already knew.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#608

Post by mulmen »

sedachv wrote: post #582
mulmen wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What gaskets leaked? Side covers? I haven't had a problem with side cover gaskets but I did have some replacement non-JIS screws back out because they were not torqued properly. Can't speak to cylinder wear, my bike has close to 10k hard miles and doesn't compression test real well but does work fine.

Old side cover gaskets did, those were easy to replace. Something else was leaking before the engine rebuild, and then something else entirely started leaking after the rebuild.

I have a hard time blaming either of those on design flaws.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#609

Post by mulmen »

sedachv wrote: post #586
taneq wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Newer than 1990 doesn't mean fuel injected and sensors out the wazoo. I have a 2001 Bandit and it's brilliant, same power and fuel economy as the current model and pure old fashioned air cooled carbie goodness. Nearly 70k kms and the mechanic reckons it'll be good for as much again.

Exactly. 1990s carbureted Japanese bikes are far superior to 1970s ones in reliability both in terms of design and manufacturing quality. But CL550s go for more than Super Blackbirds. The only reason is the steep vintage/hipster markup. The Bandit is a good example that parts availability has nothing to do with the technology used and everything to do with the market. My bike is actually a 2001 Bandit 600. The 2nd ge…

Did Honda even build a CL550? Was that a huge parallel twin or a four cylinder scrambler? Never heard of either of those configurations from Honda.

Do you mean CB550? If so they demand a higher price because they are 1) older and 2) look way better. Super Nighthawk performance isn't much to write home about relative to newer bikes for the same price and vintage bikes look really nice.

Now is probably a great time to pick up a Super Nighthawk because as with almost all vehicles their value drops off continually for their first 20 or so years until they are truly part of a previous generation of vehicles that is no longer available. Then the value starts to rise again due to scarcity.

We saw the same thing in the 90s with 1970s domestic cars which peaked in the 2000s. It's happening now with 1980s Japanese cars and has been happening to 1970s and 80s Japanese bikes.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#610

Post by mulmen »

nickbauman wrote: post #507
sedachv wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It will be in a junkyard within ten years though. I won't be able to find those sensors in a few years. Not true. You will be able to get an aftermarket ECU that can just ignore the sensors and run in open-loop mode. That will be exactly the same as running with carburetors: fixed fuel/air ratio that is almost always wrong. This is also the failure mode for OBDII cars - sensor failures lead to the ECU running in op…

As it stands, the Suzi's input pressure sensor is malfunctioning (a $200 part where available) and the bike backfires and splutters badly. So I'm not convinced that an open loop mode ECU won't end up with an engine fire or a hole in the piston. Other folks have mentioned that the mechanical points can be swapped out for a solid state ignition on the CL, closing that loop of maintenance for starters.

My solution to carburetor issues on my CL was to replace the carburetors with another design from Mikuni. You do have the option to swap a megasquirt system on to your bike and then use sensors that are cheaper or more readily available. I'm not sure if that would be easier or not but it is an option and it is something that will become increasingly more common as "new" bikes become "old" over the next 10 or so years.
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