The Rule of Silence (2006) • Hacker News Board

Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#161

Post by ajuc » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 2:07 PM UTC

skrebbel wrote: post #80

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…

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…

Powershell was much later invention. Agreed otherways.

Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#162

Post by pif » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 2:08 PM UTC

bjourne wrote: post #152

pif wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's often a stupid rule. By the way, I haven't down-voted you, but I think I understand why others did. Before calling stupid a pillar of a (programming) philosophy with decades of useful outcomes, you should stop and ask yourself whether it's just a matter of taste on your side or, even more likely, of ignorance.

But there is a limit to much respect you should pay to your elders. UNIX was invented over ten computer generations ago, and it's inventors couldn't possibly have imagined the world we live in today. And given that Windows is the dominant desktop OS, not Linux, the "decades of useful outcomes" favors my argument so I don't know who is the ignorant one.

> Windows is the dominant desktop OS

So what? Is desktop computing all that matters? Networking, scientific computing, mobile telephone, don't they matter?

Unix was never meant for looking magic to clueless users; it was meant for programmers, i.e. for people who use the computer and not just some programs written by other people. And, in its realm, it has been brilliant! Not perfect, but very good!

By the way, here's a link to learn something more: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/wsl/

Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#163

Post by yason » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 2:10 PM UTC

tim333 wrote: post #155

yason wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If structured data was embraced we would have developed appropriate tooling to interact with it in the way that we prefer. What kind of tooling might work with ad-hoc structured data and still getting all the tools to talk with each other like in Unix? How would it work without having to write input parsing rules, data processing rules, and output formatting/filtering/composing rules for each tool? I suspect that t…

>it's not very popular to pass around structured data There's an awful lot of JSON that gets passed around. That seems a reasonable compromise between readable text and some sort of structure.

So, how do you parse, read, and process JSON without additional instructions of how to interpret the data and what to look for?

All right, maybe you do have a common tool that implements a query language so that you can filter out certain paths and objects from the JSON data into a thinner data set with known formatting expected by the next command in the pipeline. Then you need to write that command and you need more instructions, possibly again in another language, to describe what you actually want to do with the data now that you know where to find it.

At this point you typically write a separate script file to do this because it's easier to express in full-blown programming language what you want to do with the tree of hashes and lists and values. On the other hand, programs for lines of text are quite short and fit on the command line.

I don't see an immediate value in structured data, and especially none that would outweight loss in general applicability and usability in comparison to text based data processing.

Don't get me wrong: I would love to see a good prototype or sketch of how such a thing would work, and then try to imagine how I might be able to apply it to similar things for which I use Unix command line today. But I'm sceptical of "how" and also quite sceptical of "why".

Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#164

Post by zajd » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 2:11 PM UTC

ygra wrote: post #133

Pxtl wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The simple fact that the Registry doesn't have comments is ludicrous.

What database has? To clarify: The registry is a database for OS or application stuff (caches, settings, etc.). It's not meant to be user-editable and outside arcane trouble-shooting stuff you're unlikely to ever have to venture in there.

> It's not meant to be user-editable

I think that's kind of a stretch since regedit has been a part of windows as long as I can remember.

Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#165

Post by stratigos » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 2:14 PM UTC

love this article. the past paragraph is great - i often claim that stores do their best to drive me away by playing horrible music and making sure i am as annoyed as possible with no hope of being able to focus on purchasing something.

Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#166

Post by kulu2002 » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 2:15 PM UTC

I think this article gives good perspective regarding User Exp of system. Windows is made for much wider audience whereas UNIX is used by skilled people. I think its inappropriate to compare both philosophies with regards to this article.

Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#167

Post by emodendroket » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 2:15 PM UTC

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 why I think PowerShell is cool.

Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#168

Post by emodendroket » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 2:16 PM UTC

I wish I could find that old thing about ordering a burger at the Unix restaurant, where the clerk keeps giving you cryptic responses when you order wrong and then, when you do successfully order, says nothing, leaving you wondering whether your order has been accepted or not.

Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#169

Post by tim333 » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 2:18 PM UTC

ygra wrote: post #34

vog wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Famous example: trying to exit vi To be fair, this has been fixed a long time ago. At least Vim (which is the Vi installed on most systems) shows the following message on startup: ~ VIM - Vi IMproved ~ ~ version 7.4.1829 ~ by Bram Moolenaar et al. ~ [...] ~ Vim is open source and freely distributable ~ ~ Help poor children in Uganda! ~ type :help iccf for information ~ ~ type :q to exit ~ type :help or for on-line…

Someone unfamiliar might just be dumped into vi because some other program thought it'd be great to open a text editor, e.g. for a commit message. You're unlikely to run vi intentionally unless you also know you want to run vi and how to exit, I guess.

Yeah happened to me. It's probably standard for anyone trying to learn GIT.

Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#170

Post by emodendroket » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 2:19 PM UTC

skrebbel wrote: post #80

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…

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 way of working is only "self-evidently" horrible if you're used to the Unix way of doing things. There are real defects that are legacy baggage (running as admin by default is not good, the registry probably shouldn't be a single database or at least should have better segregation between apps) but having a UI and having real objects in the shell isn't one of them. And I hardly think the registry and PowerShell, which came out nowhere near the same time, were conceived of at the same time.