Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Unix Philosophy

catb.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 269 posts

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#181

Post by bitwize »

School-Cotton wrote: post #42
jkot wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

X as a protocol is long gone. Direct memory access, kernel drivers etc are not really compatible with network protocol. Wayland is just streamlining and formalizing current situation.

At my old job (which I left about ten days ago) I ran X servers and clients on different machines daily. Typical example was running my IDE on my desktop, connected to an X server running on my laptop.

Nobody cares about your use case anymore. The use case that matters is the one that provides a smooth, non-janky, tear-free desktop experience.

Hell, the X primitives are so outdated, all the toolkit developers do client side rendering now.

Wayland is the bits of X that people actually use.

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#182

Post by schoen »

JadeNB wrote: post #161
jalfresi wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently I've been exploring the idea that small programs should consist of two parts; a "backend" that you can communicate with via a strict message protocol like protobuf. It can handle multiple requests because it is a mini server, the message format is locked to a "type" and you communicate with it via RPC. The second part is a "frontend", a command-line client that does all the unixy stuff with text streams etc;…

I like this idea! It seems very Unix-philosophy-y (sorry) itself; break up the programme even further, from "do one thing" to "figure out what to do" + "do it".

"Unix-philosophical"?

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#183

Post by bitwize »

pdkl95 wrote: post #90
jkot wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

X as a protocol is long gone. Direct memory access, kernel drivers etc are not really compatible with network protocol. Wayland is just streamlining and formalizing current situation.

Nonsense - I use it all the time, as do many other people I know. It is mostly GTK+ and Qt that badly misuse the protocol by rending everything client side. (OpenGL is it's own world, and works with X just fine, even remotely)

GTK+ and Qt are the two toolkits that people develop against because no one wants to use X directly, nor abominations like Xt and Motif.

If all the developer thrust is behind toolkits that "badly misuse the protocol", maybe the protocol is a really shitty fit for app development?

Welcome to why Wayland is the future and X is deprecated. Daniel Stone's talk should be required viewing before anyone speaks on the X vs. Wayland issue:

https://youtu.be/RIctzAQOe44

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#184

Post by Frondo »

yarou wrote: post #4
jumblesale wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a really great read and did a lot to inform my approach to writing all kinds of software. It's a shame that I cringe to recommend in now due to the politics of its author.

That's really bizarre. A person's political views have no bearing on the validity or usefulness of what they write.

They absolutely do, but I get your point that that's not necessarily so in every single case. ESR's page on the rationalwiki gets it right, though, when they call him a "stopped clock"--right every once in a while (and by coincidence):

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#185

Post by Frondo »

twoodfin wrote: post #107
dredmorbius wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...but his positions... His making up shit (or buying in to others' made-up shit) to justify them does, as does his ignoring contradictory evidence and record.. Which questions about what work? The problem is one of an unreliable narrator. If you cannot trust someone's judgement, and they spew crap, repeatedly, then the odds that they're blowing smoke elsewhere increase. It's the same reason that lawyers seek to impu…

I can't help but notice you managed to write something approximating the length of a short essay without once pointing out any "bullshit" in ESR's technical writing, let alone explaining how said "bullshit" must derive from his wrongthink.

I pasted this link elsewhere in the comments; the rationalwiki page talks about ESR's objectionable ideas:

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond

Now, his attitudes on HIV denialism and IQ and race don't deal with engineering, but they're pretty objectionable. And, you know, we can get good engineering writing and thinking from a lot of places. ESR doesn't have a monopoly on writing about operating systems. I'd rather promote the writers who don't carry around a ton of wrong/distasteful baggage.

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#186

Post by saidajigumi »

Retra wrote: post #162
jayvanguard wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amen. Extremism in programming, as in religion, is evil.

I would like to point out that most extremism is from the perspective of the listener, not the speaker. If I just wrote a book or article called "Functional programming is great," there'd be plenty of people replying with "Oh, but what about MY favorite style? It's not that great! You're just being extreme!" When the reality is that you can't take an opinion as the whole thought. But people do. Almost always. Regardl…

> I would like to point out that most extremism is from the perspective of the listener, not the speaker.

Believe it or not, there is a significant contingent of crazy, death-threat-making jerks fixated on "The Unix Philosophy". As in, an experimental Unixy project[1] that made the rounds (including on HN) some years back and got a fair bit of attention. The project had a vision with scale similar to that of Atom, which is soaring on the front page today. But unlike Atom, this project was quietly dropped from public view because the author received a full blast of nutball hate from misguided Defenders of the Faith/Purity/Whatever.

I've been using, studying, and working with *nix systems basically forever (longer than almost everyone reading this). But that experience made me rather allergic to ever using or hearing "The Unix Philosophy". I realized that it's heavily overused as an argument-stopper: "that's not the unix way (so off)." I've since witnessed similar language used in many projects, taken in whole context, as a dogmatic excuse rather than an actual source of architectural wisdom.

[1] Apologies for being deliberately vague. It's not my place to risk riling up the hate monsters vs. the creator of that project again. I'm still absolutely disgusted that Gamergate-level human insanity was leveled at someone putting forth what was, IMO, one of the most interesting Unix tooling experiments in the past decade.

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#187

Post by tjr »

Frondo wrote: post #184
yarou wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really bizarre. A person's political views have no bearing on the validity or usefulness of what they write.

They absolutely do, but I get your point that that's not necessarily so in every single case. ESR's page on the rationalwiki gets it right, though, when they call him a "stopped clock"--right every once in a while (and by coincidence): http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond

How then do you evaluate the validity of writings by an author whose political views you do not know?

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#188

Post by Frondo »

Haul4ss wrote: post #46
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's pro 'gun-rights'.

What's wrong with this? Being completely serious here, what is wrong with citizens owning firearms? I am all about reducing gun violence, but if you want to do that you have to do something to stem the tide of illegally acquired handguns in areas of concentrated poverty. That's where a lot of your gun violence comes from. The recent happenings in Charleston are unicorns. Unpredictable and very rare events that you ca…

Why wouldn't he/she want some sort of mass, nationwide gun buy-back program?

It's worked in Australia: http://www.slate.com/blogs/crime/2012/12/16/gun_control_afte...

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#189

Post by Frondo »

angersock wrote: post #155
Haul4ss wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with this? Being completely serious here, what is wrong with citizens owning firearms? I am all about reducing gun violence, but if you want to do that you have to do something to stem the tide of illegally acquired handguns in areas of concentrated poverty. That's where a lot of your gun violence comes from. The recent happenings in Charleston are unicorns. Unpredictable and very rare events that you ca…

Because guns scare people. Why do they scare people? Because mostly they're just seen either in the hands of cops, grunts, or criminals. Most folks (especially here) aren't hunters, or are so far removed from rural life that they have no experience of firearm-as-tool. On top of that, there is big business in demonizing guns--related to the big business (I suspect) in demonizing fighting, aggression, machismo, indepen…

Private gun ownership isn't a safeguard against "if things get too bad".

It's also unrealistic and implausible to imagine that the .gov and .mil are going to make "things get too bad".

That is no more likely to happen than a return to some sort of monarchy or crowning of an American king/queen.

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#190

Post by Frondo »

tjr wrote: post #187
Frondo wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They absolutely do, but I get your point that that's not necessarily so in every single case. ESR's page on the rationalwiki gets it right, though, when they call him a "stopped clock"--right every once in a while (and by coincidence): http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond

How then do you evaluate the validity of writings by an author whose political views you do not know?

I don't, but I also don't feel the need to.

If, however, some other tech blogger I liked started writing about "kill the gays," well, I don't need to overlook that just because I like their tech writing.

Like I said elsewhere, none of these folks has a monopoly on good engineering writing/technical thinking.

I can read, and ultimately promote, writers whose writing I wouldn't be ashamed to share with all of my friends.

Post reply on HN