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The Unix Philosophy

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Re: The Unix Philosophy

#201

Post by nwmcsween »

zvrba wrote: post #31

> The ‘Unix philosophy’ originated with Ken Thompson's early meditations on how to design a small but capable operating system with a clean service interface. Except that a program-to-program interface based on formatting and parsing text is anything but clean.

I thought the same but what are the alternatives? Use a format like json? What happens when the format can't express what I want? The other issue is the output is now deeply intertwined with the program because it's now an API, although the same could be said about text output.

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#202

Post by c22 »

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…

By the time things get that bad we've already crossed my threshold for "final" safeguard.

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#203

Post by angersock »

Frondo wrote: post #199
angersock wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Private gun ownership isn't a safeguard against "if things get too bad". Really? Because it caused us a lot of trouble during our occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. If anything, that pretty much proves it as a check on US doctrine. It's also unrealistic and implausible to imagine that the .gov and .mil are going to make "things get too bad". Fifteen years ago, even in the wake of Ruby Ridge and Waco, I might've bee…

It doesn't make sense to me to compare the military occupation of those countries with the paranoid proposal that things "could get too bad" in the U.S. Too much seems too different about those two to be meaningful; I could point to the strict gun laws in most of the western nations and ask, "why haven't they degenerated into `could get too bad'?" About the "whole lot of history since Ruby Ridge and Waco," well, I do…

What other countries are doing/not doing is a red herring--their people are not ours, their demographics are certainly not ours, their pain points are not our pain points. They additionally don't have the same political foundations and history that we do.

We have seen a continual increase in the militarization of police, the surveillance and fining of private citizens, the violation of privacy, and the bullying and exploitation of the poor.

If you're not seeing the history that I'm looking at, we're considering different news sources. I'm thinking of the Snowden leaks, the killings of citizens by police without cause (some in my own city, sadly), and so forth. I'm thinking of the delightful interplay of the prison-industrial complex with the justice system.

As for the presidency--we've seen pretty much directly the actual effectiveness of the executive branch in causing shenanigans, both in George Bush's administration and Obama's.

~

We're simply going to have to agree to disagree on this.

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#204

Post by thinkmoore »

marcosdumay wrote: post #192
thinkmoore wrote: post #175

The Unix Hater's Handbook ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix-Haters_Handbook ) has a few sections on of some of the ills of the Unix philosophy.

The UNIX Haters Handbook shows its age, it's criticizing a system that has only a passing similarity with modern unixes. But yes, it's funny.

Agreed, I posted mostly for the humor, though there are some grains of truth there still.

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#205

Post by c22 »

coldtea wrote: post #180
coldtea wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can't you evaluate his claims on their own merits? As with most things, it takes too much time to do that in detail for every argument one hears. Thankfully with the magic of brain's pattern matching and previous experience to BS arguments we don't have to. We can eliminate tons of opinions from the list of "potentially interesting to investigate" by their mere showing of certain characteristics we already know lea…

> You are conflating a property of the claim itself (violating the laws of physics) with a straw-man property of the person making the claim. They aren't the same thing - one enables a simple proof by contradiction, the other is ad-hominem. I don't see why you think I haven't considered that. My whole argument is based on the idea that ad-hominens are pefectly fine in some cases. When? For people with a bogus claims…

I'm going to dismiss everything you have to say because it doesn't look like you know how to properly respond to threads when there's a comment cooldown timer.

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#206

Post by ben11kehoe »

nwmcsween wrote: post #201
zvrba wrote: post #31

> The ‘Unix philosophy’ originated with Ken Thompson's early meditations on how to design a small but capable operating system with a clean service interface. Except that a program-to-program interface based on formatting and parsing text is anything but clean.

I thought the same but what are the alternatives? Use a format like json? What happens when the format can't express what I want? The other issue is the output is now deeply intertwined with the program because it's now an API, although the same could be said about text output.

PowerShell gives a good alternative: the things passed between the programs should be objects. It requires, of course, that everything is communicating with a common runtime, but for a shell that is not the biggest burden.

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#207

Post by marvel_boy »

anewhnaccount wrote: post #156
spiralpolitik wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Gang of Four book recommends "composition over extension" which fits neatly into the UNIX philosophy of building things by composed of smaller independent programs. The main issue that most of the common programming languages in use notably Java and C++ have very poor support for composition thus forcing developers to have to extend things.

Can you explain how exactly Java and C++ have poor support for composition? Classes can have member variables in both languages. What else is there?

Objective-C is years along of Java extending existing classes.

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#208

Post by [deleted] »

Frondo wrote: post #190
tjr wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 friend…

[deleted]

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#209

Post by Frondo »

angersock wrote: post #203
Frondo wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't make sense to me to compare the military occupation of those countries with the paranoid proposal that things "could get too bad" in the U.S. Too much seems too different about those two to be meaningful; I could point to the strict gun laws in most of the western nations and ask, "why haven't they degenerated into `could get too bad'?" About the "whole lot of history since Ruby Ridge and Waco," well, I do…

What other countries are doing/not doing is a red herring--their people are not ours, their demographics are certainly not ours, their pain points are not our pain points. They additionally don't have the same political foundations and history that we do. We have seen a continual increase in the militarization of police, the surveillance and fining of private citizens, the violation of privacy, and the bullying and e…

"What other countries are doing/not doing is a red herring" ..... but you brought up Iraq and Afghanistan.

I agree about the bullying and exploitation of the poor, I just don't think that's anything new.

I think what's new is that now, techie types like you and me are learning about the police-based murders of black people, and how hard life is for the poor. That stuff's always been going on, it just didn't make it onto our radar until very recently.

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#210

Post by webkike »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #32

I keep wondering about what seems to be the most important component of Unix philosophy: write many small programs that do one thing well and interface using text streams! Yes, modularity is important. However, in some cases, this philosophy has resulted in the "tangled mess held together by duct tape" kind of systems architecture that no one dares to touch for fear of breaking things. I think Unix philosophy is stru…

I think maybe the Unix philosophy applies to programs that users (read: programmers) use in their own time, and to make other programs.
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