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A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

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

#141

Post by jlokier »

Joker_vD wrote: post #101
FartyMcFarter wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You'd think that's what "git reset" would to, but of course not.

Ahem, the command for "Reset working directory/Discard changes/Revert to last commit" is "git reset --hard".

That's the one I use.

"git checkout -f" does the same thing, but only because their different functionality coincides when there are no other arguments. When given a non-HEAD commit-id or branch-id they do different things.

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

#142

Post by lproven »

pjmlp wrote: post #28
nix23 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should try 9front (Plan9) it's kind of the evolution of the Unix philosophy. http://9front.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs

And afterwards try Inferno, which is what Plan 9 wanted to actually be like. http://inferno-os.org/inferno/limbo.html http://doc.cat-v.org/inferno/

I tend to share your thinking on this, although at least one knowledgeable online-imaginary-friend vigorously disagrees with me.

I have looked but failed to find a VM image or even images of installable media to build one online. If you know of any, I would like to know -- and if you don't know of any, but have the skills, I think you could do a big service to the OS research community by making and sharing either install media or a VM or both.

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

#143

Post by OldHand2018 »

folbec wrote: post #56
reagent_finder wrote: post #44

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…

The 4 things I love most in Powershell, from the point of view of a maintainer of scripts, is the relative verbosity of commands (at least I don't have to go hunting for obscure acronyms, or recursive puns such as yacc, when I read code), auto-completion an auto-documentation of scripts (when I have to change something), and object pipe (as a maintainer I hate awk and regular expressions in general). Only defect is t…

You know, it's funny, the topic in this article is the forced abandonment of VMS.

Microsoft at one time had a video interview on their "Virtual Academy" with one of the PowerShell creators, and he talks about how they kept trying to create a "unixy" tool for managing Windows machines, and it never felt or worked right. So then they looked at VMS and realized it was the perfect inspiration.

Most of what you love about PowerShell comes from VMS.

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

#144

Post by gcc_programmer »

I think the author is arrogant and closed minded. He underestimates the levels of complexity of software systems and strives for some utopian "elegance of design" which I think doesn't exist. The only thing which matters is to deliver results and move forward. Requirements change: back in 1990 the internet existed in a much much smaller form, and WWW was just about to be invented. Linux had yet to be invented by Linus. Unix and Linux survived and adapted, VMS (or whatever it was named) didn't. Also the argument about "speaking English" is again so arrogant and closed-minded: not all of us are native English speakers. To me rm or delete or del or banana doesn't really matter...

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

#145

Post by jlokier »

alxlaz wrote: post #17
jgtrosh wrote: post #10

à propos means apt/appropriate as a noun in french and in English, but the phrase « à propos de … » means “about …” ; which is much more (wait for it) à propos. It is kind of weird that it was used in Unix wherein only the noun form made sense ; and even with french in mind the “apropos ” syntax (without « de ») makes it sound weird. In practice I don't think I've ever used it, and when I was a noob I often lamented…

> In practice I don't think I've ever used it, and when I was a noob I often lamented the lack of a high-level documentation of Linux which would introduce the appropriate man/info pages. It was introduced in 3.0BSD, it's pretty old :). As for usage, while I'm not a native French speaker, I don't think I've heard it used as a noun that often. I can't speak (heh :P) for Canadian speakers of French -- perhaps there are…

"apropos of nothing" is a phrase I've heard Canadian English speakers use, and so far nobody else.

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

#146

Post by OldHand2018 »

majkinetor wrote: post #123
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cycling tabs is not effective. PSreadline supports CTRL+SPACE completition - just type - and then CTRL+SPACE and it will show menu with ALL arguments. The same works if you start argument (i.e. -P shows all params starting with P)

Ctrl-Space on PowerShell is outstanding, as long as your devs are actually properly commenting their scripts (I assume your in-house PowerShell is put into modules that get installed on user machines).

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

#147

Post by FpUser »

tcbawo wrote: post #114
ptero wrote: post #89

Those articles from mid-1990s are great to read; they are both funny and informative. Even as many of the points they make are still valid today, even more valuable is the ability to look at succeesses or failures with 20+ years of hindsight. I feel the pain of the user in this particular case. But I also understand the frustration of the people who wanted to write their own smaller programs with less restrictions th…

A similar argument has also been made about JavaScript. When it comes to market share I guess most users don't care how elegant the solution is under the hood.

I was about to post the same. The first thing that came to my mind after reading "technically horrible" part of comment

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

#148

Post by m463 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #62
m463 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> largely (functionally) indistinguishable from a UNIX machine Although they were functionally similar, there were some practical considerations... I will say that path names in unix were a simple and elegant , compared to what VMS used. I recall VMS paths were something like [foo.bar.bletch]something.txt At the time this was a little cumbersome, but looking back it is much worse.

That's a cosmetic difference. The real difference is when you try to work out whether your binaries are (supposed to be) in /bin, /usr/local/bin, /sbin, etc, whether settings for a specific application and/or daemon are in $config or $.cfg or $.conf or $.cf or $d_config or .ssh and .bshrc in your personal directory, and where your web server and mail logs are. Because they might be in /var/log - or equally they might…

> that's a cosmetic difference

yes, mostly.

> Unix was "designed" by hyperactive comedy racoons with ADHD.

I have met the authors of lots of significant parts of unix and I have found them - universally - to be smart, competent and introspective.

I also found it interesting that most (85%) of top athletes were introverts.

Now to compare VMS with unix, you'll find there are some things that are better because capitalism works. Someone was in charge of VMS development, and people were paid to solve specific problems for the operating system or customers. But some things are worse because people were in charge of making trade-offs for current customers vs future direction.

On the other hand, unix also has some points in its favor. A lot of things have appeared that would not survive in a commercial business. Ideas seem to live or die depending on their merits more than by fiat.

The thing is - when people want "something that works" it usually involves tradeoffs that people don't want. You can run an older version of centos/rhel and you will find more 'it just works' at the expense of (relatively) older software. (or you can go look at the source and fix it yourself)

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

#149

Post by pjmlp »

lproven wrote: post #142
pjmlp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And afterwards try Inferno, which is what Plan 9 wanted to actually be like. http://inferno-os.org/inferno/limbo.html http://doc.cat-v.org/inferno/

I tend to share your thinking on this, although at least one knowledgeable online-imaginary-friend vigorously disagrees with me. I have looked but failed to find a VM image or even images of installable media to build one online. If you know of any, I would like to know -- and if you don't know of any, but have the skills, I think you could do a big service to the OS research community by making and sharing either in…

The OS research community knows that it is located at http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/downloads.html.

Ever heard of search engines?

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

#150

Post by majkinetor »

OldHand2018 wrote: post #146
majkinetor wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cycling tabs is not effective. PSreadline supports CTRL+SPACE completition - just type - and then CTRL+SPACE and it will show menu with ALL arguments. The same works if you start argument (i.e. -P shows all params starting with P)

Ctrl-Space on PowerShell is outstanding, as long as your devs are actually properly commenting their scripts (I assume your in-house PowerShell is put into modules that get installed on user machines).

It has no relation to comments.
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