Live data from Hacker News

A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

user.eng.umd.edu

101–110 of 286 posts

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have you ever tried to read git documentation? It is the most useless godawful piece of nonsense I ran "man git" for the first time ever. https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/git.1.html Heey, that's actually pretty good! I don't think it's "godawful". In the second sentence it recommends starting with gittutorial and giteveryday, for a "useful minimum set of commands". https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7…

The issue with git is that no matter how well documented, the user interface is horribly designed. For starters, how many different things does "git checkout" do, and how many of them actually reflect an intuitive meaning of "checking out" ?

It's the command that does "Reset working directory/Discard changes/Revert to last commit"! You'd think that's what "git reset" would to, but of course not.

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#102
post #93

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 somethi…

> There's never been a standard for naming and abbreviating flags, which means that for EACH program you will have to learn new flags. How is this different than web pages or GUI apps? Everyone is different and a button that does one thing in one app/page does something different in another. Have you tried to read GUI help files? They are written for 5 year olds and provide nothing you need as a dedicated user. Have…

GUIs have "discoverability" and "affordances". I've haven't read a single help file for any GUI application in 20 years (including apps on Windows, Linux, and Android) and somehow I can navigate and use them perfectly fine.

That's simply impossible with CLIs, you need at least read a "How to Get Started Immediately" note.

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#103

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 somethi…

I don't find `man git` to be bad at all. Git is complex, and its man pages do the right thing by referring to sources for basics info like giteveryday, and referring to in-depth guides as well. Individual man pages are also pretty good, see `man git-rebase`. It starts with an overall explanation of what rebase does, with examples, and then covers configuration options and flags. It's a lot of stuff, but it's pretty good as far as documentation goes.

GNU packages often have documentation that's bad in the typical "Linux docs are bad" way. Try `man less`. First, it commits a grave sin in having a totally useless one-line summary, which reads "less - opposite of more". Funny, but totally useless and doesn't even remotely suggest what the command does (if you know what more is on UNIX, you surely know what less does). Or `man grep`. It's a reference page, very good for knowing what all the options do, but with no useful everyday examples, and with gems like these:

> Finally, certain named classes of characters are predefined within bracket expressions, as follows. Their names are self explanatory, and they are [:alnum:], [:alpha:], [:cntrl:], [:digit:], [:graph:], [:lower:], [:print:], [:punct:], [:space:], [:upper:], and [:xdigit:].

Self explanatory? Yes, if you used grep in the 90s. Is alnum alphanumeric or all numbers? Is alpha short for alphabet, as in what most people would intuitively call letters? What's xdigit? Extra digits? Except digits? Oh, it's hex digits. Pretty obvious that periods and commas are in punct... but also + * - {} are punct, among other stuff.

`man tar` is extremely comprehensive, an impressive reference, but very hard to figure out if you've never used tar.

I've been recently looking at FreeBSD documentation for common commands, and the source code as well. Both are so much better than the usual GNU versions you find on Linux.

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#104
post #27

> Unix and C however form a powerful deterrent to the average astronomer to write her or his own code (and the average astronomer's C is much, much worse than his Fortran used to be). Compared to what? If I want to quickly bang out some code and run it, installing fedora (or another distro) is probbably the least painful way to get it done. I would say that Windows is a powerful deterrent to the average person writin…

This is about Unix v.s. VMS, not Windows v.s. Linux.

That's true. Still, I think cheph is right to point out that the situation has changed since then. I honestly got so caught up in the rhetoric of the OP that I had forgotten this for a moment.

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#106

"Anyway, have you ever tried to use man? It's fine as long as you know what you are looking for. How would you ever find out the name of command given just the function you wanted to execute? You can't. " One of my gripes with UNIX systems is how opaque they are

PowerShell takes the UNIX philosophy, cranks it up to 11, and makes commands trivially discoverable.

How to discover commands?

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#107
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's never been a standard for naming and abbreviating flags, which means that for EACH program you will have to learn new flags. How is this different than web pages or GUI apps? Everyone is different and a button that does one thing in one app/page does something different in another. Have you tried to read GUI help files? They are written for 5 year olds and provide nothing you need as a dedicated user. Have…

GUIs have "discoverability" and "affordances". I've haven't read a single help file for any GUI application in 20 years (including apps on Windows, Linux, and Android) and somehow I can navigate and use them perfectly fine. That's simply impossible with CLIs, you need at least read a "How to Get Started Immediately" note.

PowerShell does an okay job at command line discoverability in my experience. When using a cmdlet I'll think "I hope there's an argument for X" and then I can hit tab after '-' and cycle through all the available arguments. As another post mentioned, this unfortunately falls down a bit with cmdlet names themselves because they start with the verb instead of the noun: Get- isn't helpful the way NetAdapter- would be.

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#109
Quote from the article:

Douglas Adams may well have had Unix in mind when he described the products of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation thus: "It is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all. In other words --- and this is the rock solid principle on which the whole of [its] Galaxy-wide success is founded --- their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws."

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#110
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's depressing to think that the Cambrian explosion that lead to a variety of hardware, software, operating systems, and web browsers and great freedom and power for the end user is gradually getting culled and turning into a monoculture of walled gardens and the end users are just getting screwed.

Linux is considered a walled garden? Really? I mean yeah, there were more operating systems before, some of which were open.. but I'm not convinced it's necessarily bad to have one open system win. If it didn't, I'm pretty sure there would be a lot more people using windows servers, which I think would've been far worse for the open community.

> Linux is considered a walled garden? Really?

Kinda, yeah. At least in the Desktop space it seems like it desperately wants to be and Canonical in particular works to push it in that direction. For instance, it is highly discouraged to install software from outside your distro's repository.

Post reply on HN