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The Rule of Silence (2006)

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Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#121

Post by chei0iaV »

rtpg wrote: post #87
skrebbel wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 1993, someone made exactly your argument a in Redmond board room, and so many people agreed that what you describe could be adequately called "The Windows Philosophy". All settings in a database and not text files (the registry); a command-line that pipes data, not text (PowerShell). Tailored UIs to change settings, not magic invocations and obsure text file syntaxes. I guess most developers on HN are also aware o…

Surely you can reconcile structured representations and something like the Unix command line. Imagine if the default wasn't bash, but something like Ruby + pipes (or some other terse language). What is the argument for shell scripts not working on typed objects? How much time has been lost, how many bugs have been created because every single interaction between shell scripts has to include its own parser. How many v…

The problem is that now simply providing user-friendly output is not enough. For every program or script you throw together you need to provide the text output for the user, and then the type object stream for piping. And then, the user would need to read documentation to see how to access each piece of data, what data type it is, what data type the other command takes, and maybe consider how to convert one to the other.

... at which point you basically have a scripting language, so you could just as well use an existing one (e.g. Ruby).

Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#122

Post by TeMPOraL »

koralatov wrote: post #84
borplk wrote: post #74

To play devil's advocate, part of the reason things like The Rule of Silence are talked about is because of the messy unix philosophy of treating everything like plain text. If structured data was embraced we would have developed appropriate tooling to interact with it in the way that we prefer. This runs very deep in unix and a lot of people are too "brainwashed" to think of other ways. Instead they develop other ex…

I don't disagree with you, but how do we decide which structured data format to use as a replacement for plaintext? I have the sneaking feeling that a large part of why we still use plaintext is because it's established already as the standard, for worse or for better, and replacing it with a standard everyone could agree on proved impossible.

Use whatever and stick to it. The sane structured data formats differ little but by shape of the braces and some punctuation. Were UNIX developers thinking about this back in the days, they'd probably chose s-expressions or something else from that era. Now it may as well be JSON. The thing is, one format should have been picked, and a parser for it should have been available in a system library. Then we wouldn't have to agree on anything, we'd have one system standard to use.

Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#123

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

fnj wrote: post #86
bluetomcat wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Similarly, I think that Unix fell down by relying too much on unstructured text This is what made Unix last. Text and keyboards are the universal computing interface that has survived since the 1970s.

> This is what made Unix last. An unfortunate turn of phrase. It's ambiguous. Do you mean last as in "endure"? Or do you mean last as in "last place"?

both :-D.

Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#124

Post by Pxtl »

Chris2048 wrote: post #89
skrebbel wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 1993, someone made exactly your argument a in Redmond board room, and so many people agreed that what you describe could be adequately called "The Windows Philosophy". All settings in a database and not text files (the registry); a command-line that pipes data, not text (PowerShell). Tailored UIs to change settings, not magic invocations and obsure text file syntaxes. I guess most developers on HN are also aware o…

The windows registry is not too bad. You can easily store this stuff in a SQLite file though: https://www.sqlite.org/appfileformat.html PowerShell' object-oriented nature is great btw!

Around the office when teaching PowerShell we say it takes about two Googles per line. That's not a compliment.

Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#125

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

dagw wrote: post #118
qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Structured text is good. Very good, in fact. It might even be idea. structured binary data , less so, at least as a storage format. I want to be able to look at your file format using tools that haven't been specialized to the task. Is that so wrong?

Parsing structured text is slow and inefficient. Also reading out just one part of a data structure stored as text often requires either walking through the file character by character or first slurping the whole thing into memory.

...But when your system crashes, having all that data in an easily accessible manner (regardless of what tools you have on hand) is a major win.

Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#126

Post by TeMPOraL »

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #113
TeMPOraL wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but that's the point. Pipes are fine. The tools suck, though. UNIX would be infinitely better if it defaulted to piping structured text instead of making each tool have to implement its own shotgun parser.

...So you're talking about having text-serialized key-value objects (or any other kind of object), with standard deserializers and tools for manipulation? That's actually a great idea. Better yet, it's actually viable now , unlike many proposals for "fixing" unix.

> ...So you're talking about having text-serialized key-value objects (or any other kind of object), with standard deserializers and tools for manipulation?

Yes, basically. Someone in power should just pick any format - modified JSON (without the integers are really IEEE754 floats stupidity), s-expressions, whatever - and make standard deserializers part of the system library.

Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#127

Post by vog »

swiley wrote: post #111
vog wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(NOTE: The parent comment was edited. This response applies to the original parent comment that contained just the command line ("man foo" + EXAMPLE section) and nothing else.) Wow, I haven't seen such a blunt and unhelpful RFTM comment for a while. This comment is inappropriate in so many ways: 1) The unix systems have an inconsistent documentation mix of man pages, info pages, "-h", "-help", "--help", HTML docs, se…

You don't really need an "examples" section for vim, 90% of the time you just type "vim file" which the usage info probably covers well enough. You only need an "examples" section for something like zip.

> you just type "vim file" which the usage info probably covers well enough

This is wrong. If you just type "vim file", you don't get any usage info, not even in the status line. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13165795

Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#128

Post by laumars »

Chris2048 wrote: post #94
Ianvdl wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To play devil's advocate, part of the reason things like The Rule of Silence are talked about is because of the messy unix philosophy of treating everything like plain text. The amount of tooling that surrounds text is vast and has evolved over decades. You cannot replace that with a single database and call it better. I can place the majority of my config files in git and version them. I can easily perform a full…

> The amount of tooling Or the amount of cruft. > git Any structured data can still be serialized and diff'd, but it isn't always the clearest. Where is the contrast here? > made up data structures? so standardize the non-text format > Databases do not make you immune from typos Depends on the constraints. There are few on text files, possibly excluding sudoers. If you aren't sticking to good practice you can just as…

You can rm a database as well. In multiple different ways in fact. You can also put constraints on text files by forcing editing via a helper program (much like visudo and crontab do). In that regard the text format isn't much different from a database format aside the encoding of the data (it's probably also worth mentioning that you can - and some people do - store a database as flat text files if you wanted. They don't necessarily have to be binary blobs).

> "What happens when the kernel has a bug or vulnerability? There are quite a few mature db systems. Plus, all text files depend on the file-system, which is why you store root on something stable like ext (still depends on hdd drivers though, unless you have some some ramfs on boot)."

I'm not sure I get your point. What do kernel bugs have to do with text vs binary formats? Or the argument for or against centralised databases? Databases still need to store files on persistent storage so if your text files are compromised from a kernel vulnerability or instability in the file system then your binary database files will also be.

Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#129

Post by borplk »

koralatov wrote: post #84
borplk wrote: post #74

To play devil's advocate, part of the reason things like The Rule of Silence are talked about is because of the messy unix philosophy of treating everything like plain text. If structured data was embraced we would have developed appropriate tooling to interact with it in the way that we prefer. This runs very deep in unix and a lot of people are too "brainwashed" to think of other ways. Instead they develop other ex…

I don't disagree with you, but how do we decide which structured data format to use as a replacement for plaintext? I have the sneaking feeling that a large part of why we still use plaintext is because it's established already as the standard, for worse or for better, and replacing it with a standard everyone could agree on proved impossible.

Plaintext is the lazy way out. It's not even remotely a standard because everyone does it differently.

It's the shortest path from thinking "I need to persist this crap" to getting something working. Write the bytes to a file, sprinkle some separators, read and parse it back.

Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#130

Post by taneq »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #101
borplk wrote: post #74

To play devil's advocate, part of the reason things like The Rule of Silence are talked about is because of the messy unix philosophy of treating everything like plain text. If structured data was embraced we would have developed appropriate tooling to interact with it in the way that we prefer. This runs very deep in unix and a lot of people are too "brainwashed" to think of other ways. Instead they develop other ex…

That's my primary issue with UNIX culture. It took a huge step backwards by deciding to work with unstructured text. It wasn't a wrong turn , mind you. It was backtracking on known and understood best practices all the way and then picking a wrong turn. And only now people seem to rediscover what was in common use in the era before UNIX - the virtues of structured text. I guess our industry is meant to run in circles…

It's not like unstructured piped text is the only possible way to work. It's widely used precisely because it's so expedient. If you use structured data, then every program in the sequence has to understand the structure. If you just smash everything flat into a stream of text, you can then massage it into whatever form you need.

It's not always the best way to approach a problem, but it's not meant to be. It's duct tape. You use it where it's good enough.

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