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The Unix Philosophy

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Re: The Unix Philosophy

#111

Post by twoodfin »

peteretep wrote: post #86
twoodfin wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ESR's views particularly on guns, libertarian economics and politics, and AGW, all present pretty standard cases of assuming a frame and fitting all data to that frame. Chopping, discarding, and/or fabricating data as necessary to do so. That actually directly calls into question engineering validity, as solid engineering is solidly based in reality and a realistic interpretation of facts. Also the ability to discard…

> This is just a dressed up ad hominem No, it's explicitly and purposefully ad-hominem, suggesting that a person's lack of judgement in one area leads to questions about his judgement in a related one.

Many (most) people, including many highly respected scientists and engineers, are fully capable of displaying incredible judgment in their discipline yet awful judgment in other aspects of their lives. Should we put an asterisk on papers published by researchers in the middle of messy divorces?

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#112

Post by ageofwant »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #74
laichzeit0 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding [2]. So I guess this quote is the problem: > And the part that, if you are a decent human being and not a racist bigot, you have been dreading: American blacks average a standard deviation lower in IQ than American whites at about 85. [...] And yes, it’s genetic; g seems to be about 85% heritable, and recent studies of effects like regression towards the mean suggest strongly that most of the heritability i…

"If it is factually true it's disingenuous to label him as a racist." Not true. Something can be factually true but uninteresting or of no consequence; pushing that 'truth' forward as something that other should acknowledge betrays an agenda beyond just 'the search for truth'. (Note that this is not a judgement on ESR per se, just a comment on your specific point)

But it is interesting and of consequence. Especially as it highlights how truth ever becomes the slave of fashion. If it it is demonstrably true that race and IQ is linked then stating that as a fact does not make one a racist.

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#113

Post by vezzy-fnord »

userbinator wrote: post #36
el33th4xx0r wrote: post #29

I wonder how relevant is it nowadays. Many good things we can't have, like systemd, if we have to follow strictly to the unix philosophy.

For a lot of people, the set of "good things" does not include systemd.

Not to mention you can certainly get feature parity with systemd while still being Unix philosophy-robust. See the nosh service manager.

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#114

Post by tjr »

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.

Further, I suspect the main reason there's any concern at all about recommending ESR's writings due to his politics is because he bothers to write a lot about his political views in the first place, presenting something to potentially disagree with.

Many programmers / writers / programmer-writers may well have equally strong political views in one direction or another, with which others may strongly agree or disagree, but they just don't say much about them in public.

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#115

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

Haul4ss wrote: post #103
tom_morrow wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so you are saying there is a correlation between guns-per-capita and gun-deaths-per-capita?

No, I'm (foolishly) responding to an Onion article of all things. The claim is being made that the U.S. is the only place where mass killings with firearms happen. I'm merely stating this isn't true.

Just to clarify, here's the headline (my emphasis):

"‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens"

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#116

Post by marrs »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #24
philh wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Among other unpopular opinions, ESR denies AGW, believes that race and IQ are correlated, and was strongly in favor of the Iraq war.

None of these seem even remotely relevant to engineering. Moreover, research, discovery and innovation requires letting people having freedom to think. That includes holding unpopular, controversial or politically incorrect opinions. We are so worried about Evil Government dictating what we can and cannot think that we haven't noticed the current organic trend to prosecute every other person for thoughtcrimes. It's n…

I'm glad I'm not the only one who's noticed this

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#117

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

harkyns_castle wrote: post #72
laichzeit0 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding [2]. So I guess this quote is the problem: > And the part that, if you are a decent human being and not a racist bigot, you have been dreading: American blacks average a standard deviation lower in IQ than American whites at about 85. [...] And yes, it’s genetic; g seems to be about 85% heritable, and recent studies of effects like regression towards the mean suggest strongly that most of the heritability i…

I think the problem is, its a bit more complicated than that. There are a myriad of factors that might influence that IQ score, and I haven't looked at the studies. Lack of wealth/opportunity I think is definitely a factor in the healthy development of the grey matter, as is access to good education. Long/short, not sure. I'd be surprised if the colour of your skin objectively made a difference in IQ. Same with gende…

I wouldn't be surprised if skin colour made a difference to IQ. But I wouldn't be surprised for social and political reasons, not genetic ones.

It's actually not possible to make a genetic argument, because genetically there are no non-trivial markers that robustly correlate with "black" or "white."

http://web.mit.edu/racescience/in_media/what_dna_says_about_...

Suggesting otherwise is simple ignorant bigotry.

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#118

Post by nkassis »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #79
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…

I'm not sure I can say there's something absolutely wrong with it, but my opinion is that citizens shouldn't be allowed to own firearms. I live somewhere (UK) where they can't, and there is very little gun violence. That's not to say, of course, there aren't problems, but I just think - on balance - the world would be better off with fewer killing machines in it.

I'm not pro gun but many countries like Canada have pretty high gun ownership yet have low gun violence numbers. I think there is more to the problem then just disallowing private gun ownership would solve. It's a band aid fix in my view.

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#119

Post by spiralpolitik »

ajross wrote: post #96
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…

> 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. Pretty much, just as Booch's philosophy has given us tangled messes of class hierarchies with cross references pointed every which way. And just as The Gang of Four gave us AbstractedTangleMessFactorySingleton. The distinction with the Unix…

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.

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#120

Post by deckiedan »

jalfresi wrote: post #92
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…

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;…

Surely a lot of that could be done with a commandline switch?

    tape_robot start -tapeid=1
as the quick hacky version, and:

    tape_robot --protobuf 'msg:start;tapeid:1'
(replace the 'single:quote;string:thing' with your protobuf message.), or

    tape_robot --protobuf_file filename
The filename could be a fifo or socket, of course. Then use a general purpose server which runs the programs:

    proto_serve tape_robot 127.0.0.1:8080
or whatever.

This (to me) is closer to the unix idea - one server program, one actual processing app. Why should my tape_robot program actually have a server embedded in it?

If in the future, I want to add authentication, I only have to add it (once) to the proto_serve program, rather than to every single application that is a 'server', for instance.

It would also allow a version which 'pre-forked' the processes, and left them waiting for the data on the socket/filehandle, or whatever.

You could do a bunch of this already using nc or similar, I suspect.

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