The Unix Philosophy • Hacker News Board

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#151

Post by KingMob » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 4:08 PM UTC

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…

It's disingenuous to equate huge numbers of people disagreeing with you on the internet to the government suppressing you with law or force.

ESR is free to speak his beliefs in public, and in return people are free to criticize him, not recommend his books, refuse to invite him to conferences, etc.

Freedom of speech is about prior restraint, not immunity from consequences.

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#152

Post by JoeAltmaier » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 4:10 PM UTC

McElroy wrote: post #150

At my place of work, we have a client relationship to a company like ours in a neighbouring country. They develop a software that is of much use to us so we pay a license to them for it. They are nice people but god damnit, there is one thing they just never got right. They only support one platform, one that is certified UNIX, yet no matter how severe an error, their cli tools and scripts exit with 0 no matter what.…

This can be a very good fit. Smart companies hire their customers' best engineers with the most familiarity with their product. The best, smartest feedback comes with that package.

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#153

Post by fnordfnordfnord » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 4:13 PM UTC

d_theorist wrote: post #34

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.

The first two are scientific, rather than political questions, aren't they?

They are scientific questions if ESR publishes or attempts to publish scientific papers to support his opinions, or otherwise attempts to represent himself as a scientist.

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#154

Post by coldtea » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 4:16 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #95

coldtea wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except if he writes anything about politics, economics, society, etc -- in which case his political views have quite a bearing on the validity or usefulness of what they write.

Can't you evaluate his claims on their own merits? Unless he's saying "trust me, I won't expose my reasoning but it's solid", or unless you are outsourcing your thinking, such things would seem to be irrelevant.

>Can't you evaluate his claims on their own merits?

As with most things, it takes too much time to do that in detail for every argument one hears.

Thankfully with the magic of brain's pattern matching and previous experience to BS arguments we don't have to.

We can eliminate tons of opinions from the list of "potentially interesting to investigate" by their mere showing of certain characteristics we already know lead to bogus thinking. ("Hey man, I made a perpetual motion machine. Wait, where are you going? Don't you wanna hear how I made it? You're so close minded" -- or "I don't believe in climate change, it's all bogus. Here's what I think about educational reform...").

Sure, we might get a few false negatives (some good suggestions lost because their originator is a bigot etc), but the system overall works wonders for reducing the signal to noise ratio.

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#155

Post by angersock » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 4:16 PM UTC

Haul4ss wrote: post #46

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's pro 'gun-rights'.

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…

Because guns scare people. Why do they scare people? Because mostly they're just seen either in the hands of cops, grunts, or criminals. Most folks (especially here) aren't hunters, or are so far removed from rural life that they have no experience of firearm-as-tool.

On top of that, there is big business in demonizing guns--related to the big business (I suspect) in demonizing fighting, aggression, machismo, independence, or what have you.

I'll be the first to admit that there is no peaceful practical purpose outside of sport or investment for owning firearms in an urban area.

That said, it never ceases to amaze me that in an age of such universal and pervasive surveillance--an age of such unaccountability of authority figures in the .gov and .mil--that folks here are still more than happy to trash on the final safeguard they've got if things get too bad.

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#156

Post by anewhnaccount » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 4:18 PM UTC

spiralpolitik wrote: post #119

ajross wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Can you explain how exactly Java and C++ have poor support for composition? Classes can have member variables in both languages. What else is there?

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#157

Post by fnordfnordfnord » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 4:19 PM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #16

yarou wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really bizarre. A person's political views have no bearing on the validity or usefulness of what they write.

I don't think jumblesale is arguing that his writings are incorrect or not useful, just that he doesn't like popularizing his works because of the authors political views.

It's still a shame. I certainly don't feel like I have to love everything a person does in order to learn something from them, or even respect some of their work. Likewise, I don't require everyone to agree with my personal opinions in order to pass my courses. Things would really become cumbersome were I to ever change my mind about something.

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#158

Post by coderjames » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 4:22 PM UTC

lmm wrote: post #40

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…

The big problem I've found is serialization of sum types. thrift (or protobuf or any number of similar systems) is very good at serializing most of the data one tends to work with, with declarations that are suitably strict but easy to write. But it doesn't have a good way to represent "this field is an A or a B".

Protobuf has somewhat recently added the 'oneof' feature which tries to deal with these union types.

The one downside I found when trying to use it was that the 3rd-party C# Protobuf libraries didn't yet support it.

See: https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/proto#on...

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#159

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 4:22 PM UTC

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…

It's your viewpoint that makes you think it becomes a mess of duct tape and not some failing of the philosophy. To improve the philosophy you look outside the box not inside it i.e. not at http. Something like, "everything is a file" is an improved philosophy (but I'm cheating of course because I know this is a plan9 philosophy to improve upon unix).

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#160

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 4:25 PM UTC

KingMob wrote: post #151

TeMPOraL wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's disingenuous to equate huge numbers of people disagreeing with you on the internet to the government suppressing you with law or force. ESR is free to speak his beliefs in public, and in return people are free to criticize him, not recommend his books, refuse to invite him to conferences, etc. Freedom of speech is about prior restraint, not immunity from consequences.

Is it now? When you can get fired from your job over your private beliefs, when even a Nobel prize winner can have his (and her - completely innocent - wife's) career ended on the spot, when you can lose your home over disagreeing with "status quo", I say something is wrong.

Maybe this is how democratic - as opposed to totalitarian - oppression looks like. When you have to avoid discussions out of fear you'll get fired and blacklisted in the industry, this suddenly doesn't look so different than what refusal to government "truth" looked like several decades ago.