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The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

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Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#151

Post by nunez »

jstewartmobile wrote: post #124

I wish Symbolics had a better run. The Windows registry/powershell approach has the niceness of passing pieces of data instead of one big blob of text that has to be re-parsed at every step, but with the drawback of verbosity and fussy static typing. Being able to directly pass s-expressions between between programs without the format/parse/typing hokey-pokey of Unix and Windows would be nice.

and latency if you're trying to do anything with PS objects over a slow link. (try doing a 'get-childobject' on a SMB share or loading the registry on a host behind a slow connection; i'll wait)

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#152

Post by SSLy »

pjmlp wrote: post #145
Arizhel wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Windows 10 already sorted out the filename limitations. No, it hasn't. Filenames are still case-insensitive (and in a terrible way, where it seems to remember how they were first typed but that can never be changed), backslashes are still used for path separators instead of escaping characters, and the worst of all is that drive letters are still in use, which is an utterly archaic concept from the days of systems w…

Complaints of a UNIX refugee on Windows. For us, Windows pathanmes are just fine. As for Windows architecture, maybe you should spend some hours reading Windows Internals book series, BUILD and Channel 9 sessions about MinWin, Drawbridge, Picoprocesses, UWP, User Space Drivers, Secure Kernel,....

>you should spend some hours reading Windows Internals book series

I'd love to read the source code myself to see how it works instead

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#153

Post by nxc18 »

Arizhel wrote: post #137
pjmlp wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 10 already sorted out the filename limitations. A few more releases and in around 10 years, Win32 will be drinking beers with Carbon. Mono and Qt don't change the architecture of UNIX and their adoption across UNIX variants isn't a game changer.

>Windows 10 already sorted out the filename limitations. No, it hasn't. Filenames are still case-insensitive (and in a terrible way, where it seems to remember how they were first typed but that can never be changed), backslashes are still used for path separators instead of escaping characters, and the worst of all is that drive letters are still in use, which is an utterly archaic concept from the days of systems w…

Windows NT (the core OS) suffers none of those problems.

The Windows (Win32) environment suffers those limitations. It also suffers 20+ years of strong binary compatibility, broad hardware support, and consistent reliability that systems of similar class (e.g. Linux desktops) can't match.

If it makes you feel any better, drive letters are a convenient illusion made possible by the Win32 subsystem; NT has no such concept and mounts file systems into the object hierarchy (NT is fundamentally object oriented - a more modern and flexible design than is provided by UNIX).

The fundamental architecture of Windows, the kernel, hasn't changed in ages because it doesn't need to; it is far more sophisticated than UNIX will ever be and far more sophisticated than you will ever need. The fundamental architecture of Win32 hasn't changed since 32-bits was an exciting concept and it won't change because the market has said loud and clear that they want Windows-level compatibility. See Windows RT and The Year of the Linux Desktop for evidence that users aren't clamoring to ditch Win32 in favor of something more pure.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#154

Post by rsync »

I think it's very telling that the author consistently refers to directories as "folders".

All of UNIX makes perfect sense if you are using UNIX for UNIX.

If you're doing other things, like abstracting to "folders" and so on ... I am open minded and can see where it starts to fall apart a bit.

But I use UNIX for the sake of UNIX ... I am interested specifically in doing UNIX things. It works great for that.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#155

Post by CalChris »

moosingin3space wrote: post #131
CalChris wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds just like Rust as well.

Literally have never heard Rustaceans defend poor design choices like that before.

Well, if you don't get that someone else might see something as a flaw then perhaps you wouldn't understand that you may be defending a bad design choice.

I use Rust. There's a bunch of things I do not like about Rust. Its macro language is nigh on unusable. A macro language should be an expedient; it should allow you to get textual things done, committing necessary atrocities along the way knowing that the result must still pass muster with the compiler. It isn't supposed to remind you of a 61A midterm.

I like the safety and that is why I use Rust. I don't get adding functional programming to a systems programming language.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#156

Post by ChuckMcM »

That was a sad thing to read, the author is so clueless they don't even know when the reasons they imagine something might have been broken are wrong.

Back when UNIX was born the character was a first class citizen in every computer on the planet, and many languages used it as part of their syntax. Static binaries were invented when Sun and Berkeley co-developed shared libraries and there needed to be binaries that you knew would work before shared libraries were available (during boot before things were all mounted, during recovery, etc)

It always amazed me when someone looks at computer systems of the 70's through the lens of "today's" technology and then projects a failure of imagination on the part of those engineers back in the 70's. I pointed out to such a person that the font file for Courier (60 - 75K depending) was more than the entire system memory (32KW or 64KB) that you could boot 2.1BSD in.

Such sillyness.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#157

Post by derefr »

Analemma_ wrote: post #10

Everyone should, at some point, read The Unix-Haters Handbook. A great deal of it is outdated or simply wrong, but it does have a running theme of a prediction that has largely been borne out: people assuming that all Unix's flaws are actually virtues and that if you don't think so, then you Just Don't Get It. It's not hard to see how this happened: since pretty much all computers that people normally interact with a…

> since pretty much all computers that people normally interact with are either running Windows or a Unix-like system, it has set up a dichotomy in people's minds

I really wish undergraduate Software Engineering programs included a course that was a survey of operating systems, where you'd write the same program (that did a lot of IPC) on, say, base WinNT (kernel objects with ACLs!); base Darwin (Mach ports!); a unikernel framework like MirageOS; something realtime like QNX; the Java Card platform for smart-cards; and so forth. Maybe even include something novel, like http://genode.org.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#158

Post by teddyh »

pjmlp wrote: post #13

Where everything is a file handle, except when it is not (sockets, IPC, ...).

Note: A “file handle” is a FILE *, i.e. a stream as used by a lot of the higher-level functions of the C library. The term you were looking for is probably “file descriptor”. (Or possibly “inode”, “directory entry”, or “file name”? It’s not entirely clear what you mean.)

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#159

Post by Const-me »

My favorite one “everything is a file”.

My GPU has 4 times as many transistors as my CPU, and for parallel tasks, it computes stuff 50 times faster. Just too much complexity for a file, even with ioctl.

I think that ideology is the main reason for the current state of 3D graphics in nix and bsd based platforms.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#160

Post by rocqua »

rsync wrote: post #154

I think it's very telling that the author consistently refers to directories as "folders". All of UNIX makes perfect sense if you are using UNIX for UNIX. If you're doing other things, like abstracting to "folders" and so on ... I am open minded and can see where it starts to fall apart a bit. But I use UNIX for the sake of UNIX ... I am interested specifically in doing UNIX things. It works great for that.

What then are "UNIX things".

This could be either a no-true-Scotsman, or a tautology. To solve this, you'd need to specify what UNIX is good at.

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