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" ?
A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
101–110 of 286 posts
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#102Pretty 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…
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)
#103Pretty 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…
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> 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.
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#105Re: 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.
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#107Earlier 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.
Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#108Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
#109Douglas 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)
#110Earlier 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.
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.