A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

You are right. Some other complaints have have no aged well either (especially things like case insignificance, which we all know is extremely difficult to get right once you leave the confines of English).

Unix has a lot of issues on a lower level, but very few people discuss that, since it's a complicated topic.

Pretty much each point raised in this post(?) are correct, current and relevant even 26 years later.

POSIX is a monolith and really deserves to be improved. It's been around forever, yes. It will probably keep on being around forever, yes.

    Take the tar command (please!), which is already a nightmare where lower-case `a' means "check first" and upper-case `A' means "delete all my disk files without asking" (or something like that --- I may not have the details exactly right). In some versions of tar these meanings are reversed. This is a virtue?

Raise your hand if you've never broken Grep because the flags you gave it didn't work. Anyone? Congratulations, you've worked on a single version of grep your entire life. Have a cookie.

Pretty much the only consistent grep flag I know is -i. There's never been a standard for naming and abbreviating flags, which means that for EACH program you will have to learn new flags.

This becomes truly terrible when you get around to, say, git and iptables. Have you ever tried to read git documentation? It is the most useless godawful piece of nonsense this side of the Moon.

There's Google now, which means that the fundamental design issues of POSIX will probably never get issued. "Just google it and paste in from stackoverflow" is already standard, and people are already doing that for 5-10-year-old code/shell commands. What about 10 years from now, will googling best DHCP practices still find that stupid post from 2008 that never got actually resolved? How about 20 years?

I have honestly no idea how to even start fixing the problem. A proper documentation system would be a start.

Lots of Unix commands could have had better names :).

FWIW, though, the noun form is even less uncommon in languages that borrowed the expression from French. In my native language (also a Latin language, so borrowing it was straightforward), its use a noun is very limited. Saying that a book is "full of à-propos" (as in "pleine d’à-propos"), for example, wouldn't mean it's apt, or very relevant, it would mean that it's full of subtle, possibly contrarian or lewd motives. That's more or less how it's used in English, too.

To non-French speakers -- given when apropos showed up, the Unix audience was very American-centric --, who've only heard it used in the other sense, it actually sounds very appropriate, possibly even more appropriate than about, given how apropos (the program) works.

> POSIX is a monolith and really deserves to be improved.

I want it to be improved but I fear it is becoming irrelevant. There are very few OSes left to be compatible with...

Two points about bad documentation:

The documentation (and syntax, or lack thereof) of "tc" are significantly worse than git's. Unfortunately, the network management tool you are supposed to use these days, ip, is made by the same people, though somewhat less bad.

Second, take git documentation with humor: https://git-man-page-generator.lokaltog.net/