Free Your Technical Aesthetic from the 1970s • Hacker News Board

Re: Free Your Technical Aesthetic from the 1970s

#11

Post by ams6110 » Sun, Jul 18, 2010, 12:21 AM UTC

0bfusct3 wrote: post #10

mseebach wrote: post #3

To me, the aesthetic of *nixes is the way everything is neatly arranged around the same set of relatively simple abstractions: executables, shell scripts, processes and text files. Yes, there's a learning curve, but once you're around the bend it's pretty flat. Skills are generally general -- once you know how to do X, chances are you've touched a great deal of the tools you need to Y. Windows is somewhat simple (but…

The same can be said for *nixes, in order to create something in sh using programs you need literally days of reading man pages for switches, etc or use perl, python, etc.. but even then many tools don't have bindings so you're back to use sh. All operating systems currently popular are crap except for the most popular one in it's usage domain.

This assumes you aren't online, where nearly any shell script example you can think of is likely only a google search away. I don't think that anyone really spends days studying man pages anymore. Though it's nice that they are there when you need to look up something system-specific.

Re: Free Your Technical Aesthetic from the 1970s

#12

Post by ams6110 » Sun, Jul 18, 2010, 12:23 AM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #7

I used Suns as my primary development environment from '89 to '96 and I really don't recognize most of those complaints - just about everyone I knew used emacs, xman was pretty handy for reading man pages and the supplied Sun manuals were awesome. I'm pretty sure I used ksh that had interactive command line history as well. I've used a lot of different Unix variants (BSD, Ultrix, OSF/1, SunOS, various Linux distros)…

I used ksh on HPUX in the early '90s and it definitely had searchable command history

Re: Free Your Technical Aesthetic from the 1970s

#13

Post by contextfree » Sun, Jul 18, 2010, 12:30 AM UTC

mseebach wrote: post #3

To me, the aesthetic of *nixes is the way everything is neatly arranged around the same set of relatively simple abstractions: executables, shell scripts, processes and text files. Yes, there's a learning curve, but once you're around the bend it's pretty flat. Skills are generally general -- once you know how to do X, chances are you've touched a great deal of the tools you need to Y. Windows is somewhat simple (but…

It's true that core Unix has a degree of conceptual integrity that Microsoft software for example usually lacks†, but I wonder how much that buys you when put in the context of a complete system, running, say, Linux, GNU utilities (whose aesthetic tends to be subtly different), Emacs, X, GNOME, Firefox, OpenOffice, and probably some distro-specific system utilities/duct tape written in Perl or Python or something. I'm not sure the conceptual divergence can be written off as a fault of the divergent software, either.

† Microsoft tends to be fairly zealous about preserving backward compatibility while at the same time being aggressive about pursuing new trends. It's very difficult to do both of those and maintain conceptual integrity at the same time.

Re: Free Your Technical Aesthetic from the 1970s

#14

Post by zokier » Sun, Jul 18, 2010, 12:56 AM UTC

chipsy wrote: post #6

matthewn wrote: post #4

"By way of comparison, on my home PC I used a third-party command shell called 4DOS [...] It had a wonderful command line history mechanism: type part of a command, then press up-arrow." Want in bash? Add to ~/.inputrc: # up and down arrows do incremental history search "\e[A": history-search-backward "\e[B": history-search-forward

Why do old Unix programs always have bad defaults?

Because the defaults come from 70's, and lots of nice stuff has added since, but nobody dared to touch the defaults.

Re: Free Your Technical Aesthetic from the 1970s

#15

Post by glhaynes » Sun, Jul 18, 2010, 1:30 AM UTC

0bfusct3 wrote: post #9

Unix is bad, crusty and getting less relevant due to how computers are becoming more distributed and less as a single system. Linux may be the top of the herd right now but sooner rather than later there is going to be a huge paradigm shift into distributed computing. Linux will have no place in distributed computing without either layers upon layers to the POSIX API (aka backwards compatibility) or well a new operat…

What sort of distribution of computing is going to happen beyond what's already happened?

Re: Free Your Technical Aesthetic from the 1970s

#16

Post by moomba » Sun, Jul 18, 2010, 1:52 AM UTC

matthewn wrote: post #4

"By way of comparison, on my home PC I used a third-party command shell called 4DOS [...] It had a wonderful command line history mechanism: type part of a command, then press up-arrow." Want in bash? Add to ~/.inputrc: # up and down arrows do incremental history search "\e[A": history-search-backward "\e[B": history-search-forward

This is the first thing I change in any linux system I'm working with. I've become completely dependent on prefixed history.

Never liked the Ctrl+R thing.

Re: Free Your Technical Aesthetic from the 1970s

#17

Post by moomba » Sun, Jul 18, 2010, 1:55 AM UTC

0bfusct3 wrote: post #9

Unix is bad, crusty and getting less relevant due to how computers are becoming more distributed and less as a single system. Linux may be the top of the herd right now but sooner rather than later there is going to be a huge paradigm shift into distributed computing. Linux will have no place in distributed computing without either layers upon layers to the POSIX API (aka backwards compatibility) or well a new operat…

I'm wondering why you're saying linux has no place in distributed computing. Most supercomputers and distributed systems run linux. Not sure what paradigm shifts are going to have a significant impact on the OS. The only changes I've seen are in hardware/programming syntax as of late.

Re: Free Your Technical Aesthetic from the 1970s

#18

Post by 0bfusct3 » Sun, Jul 18, 2010, 2:00 AM UTC

glhaynes wrote: post #15

0bfusct3 wrote: post #9

Unix is bad, crusty and getting less relevant due to how computers are becoming more distributed and less as a single system. Linux may be the top of the herd right now but sooner rather than later there is going to be a huge paradigm shift into distributed computing. Linux will have no place in distributed computing without either layers upon layers to the POSIX API (aka backwards compatibility) or well a new operat…

What sort of distribution of computing is going to happen beyond what's already happened?

Simple interfaces tying into a vm for complete distribution of software on any architecture. Concurrent, functional and slightly object orientated low level languages allowing automatic formal provability and easier formal provability. This is all quiet similar to Microsofts Midori / Singularity from what I can read on it anyways... but I'm sure Microsoft will screw it up somehow and cripple it.

Re: Free Your Technical Aesthetic from the 1970s

#19

Post by 0bfusct3 » Sun, Jul 18, 2010, 2:02 AM UTC

ams6110 wrote: post #11

0bfusct3 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same can be said for *nixes, in order to create something in sh using programs you need literally days of reading man pages for switches, etc or use perl, python, etc.. but even then many tools don't have bindings so you're back to use sh. All operating systems currently popular are crap except for the most popular one in it's usage domain.

This assumes you aren't online, where nearly any shell script example you can think of is likely only a google search away. I don't think that anyone really spends days studying man pages anymore. Though it's nice that they are there when you need to look up something system-specific.

That's like saying language y is fine because I can just search and copy and paste... no you cannot. If you do anything beyond a simple [[ -f somefile ]] && do something sh turns into a nightmare.. case in point autotools.

Re: Free Your Technical Aesthetic from the 1970s

#20

Post by 0bfusct3 » Sun, Jul 18, 2010, 2:08 AM UTC

moomba wrote: post #17

0bfusct3 wrote: post #9

Unix is bad, crusty and getting less relevant due to how computers are becoming more distributed and less as a single system. Linux may be the top of the herd right now but sooner rather than later there is going to be a huge paradigm shift into distributed computing. Linux will have no place in distributed computing without either layers upon layers to the POSIX API (aka backwards compatibility) or well a new operat…

I'm wondering why you're saying linux has no place in distributed computing. Most supercomputers and distributed systems run linux. Not sure what paradigm shifts are going to have a significant impact on the OS. The only changes I've seen are in hardware/programming syntax as of late.

Sure they do but they use extremely specialized software that probably took years to apply to the platform let alone developing the software. Linux is the top in distributed computing because it filled a niche (free) and has momentum if BSD, L4, etc was created then / didn't have some sort of issue we'd all be using kernel x instead of linux