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In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

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Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#191

Post by dredmorbius »

pavlov wrote: post #40

The CLI has a massive blind spot in today’s operating systems: it knows nothing useful about events. Yet events are the primary way anything happens on a computer, whether it’s a user system or a server.

That's the specific hole which Expect fills for scripting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expect>

Much of modern operating systems is events-based and relies on polling for specific actions, devices connecting / disconnecting, etc. Linux device management is based on this, for example. There are numerous scripts which fire as a service is enabled or disabled (networking "ifup" and "ifdown" scripts, for example), or services are started / stopped. Systemd extends these capabilities markedly.

And of course there's a whole slew of conditional processing, beginning with init scripts, [], test, &&, ||, and specific conditional logic within shells, scripting, and programming languages.

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#192

Post by smackeyacky »

throwawaydummy wrote: post #181
mxwsn wrote: post #2

This essay by Neal Stephenson was first published in 1999. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_... The analogy of OS as cars (Windows is a station wagon, Linux is a tank) is brought up in the recent Acquired episode on Microsoft, where Vista was a Dodge Viper but Windows 7 was a Toyota Camry, which is what users actually wanted.

I didn’t know myself let alone computers but anyone know why Vista and Windows 8 got such bad reps?

They were given “tablet friendly” user interfaces that made navigation extremely difficult. But Microsoft never finished the job so you’d try to find something in the stupid sliding screen interface only to be thrown into a windows 3.1 era control panel. Windows server of that era was even worse, as mostly you administered using RDP but it never played nice with the “hover here to bring up the whole screen menu” required to drive it.

Underneath it was just Windows, but the interface ruined it

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#193

Post by jlarocco »

_yb2s wrote: post #129
llm_trw wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given what OS X has become it's un-obsoleted itself again. It's kind of ironic that you're using a post from 20 years ago to invalidate an essay from 25 years ago, about an OS that's been substantially dumbed down in the last 10 years. Bad corporate blood will tell.

In what way has it been “dumbed down?” I use modern MacOS as a Unix software development workstation and it works great- nothing substantial has changed in 20 years other than better package managers. I suppose they did remove X11 but it’s trivial to install yourself.

I stopped using it a few years ago, but IMO it was definitely being dumbed down and not respecting users any more. Things like upgrades reseting settings that I went out of the way to change - Apple has a "we know better than you" attitude that's frustrating to work around.

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#194

Post by jlarocco »

kstrauser wrote: post #179
j2kun wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stopped using Mac because of the planned obsolescence, which is a huge problem with machines even 4 years old. Can't even update those BSD utils anymore because you can't update the OS, because you don't have the latest hardware, because you don't want to spend 2k more to get back the basics you had already paid for.

MacOS Sequoia supports every computer 4 years old. Almost no apps or CLI programs will absolutely require it unless they’re specifically invented to support some brand new feature. I’m running it on my 2018 Mac Mini. If you wish Apple supported computers longer, fine. I’d personally disagree because I’ve had wonderful luck with them supporting my old hardware until said hardware was so old that it was time to replace…

It's ridiculous that you would claim this isn't a problem.

I'm typing this on a 12 year old MacBook Pro running Debian whose hardware perfectly fine, but hasn't been supported by Apple in years.

FWIW, Debian supports it fine, though NVidia recently dropped support for the GPU in their Linux drivers.

I'm going to miss it when it dies, too. Plastic Lenovos just can't compare.

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#195

Post by wizardforhire »

isametry wrote: post #132
_yb2s wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way has it been “dumbed down?” I use modern MacOS as a Unix software development workstation and it works great- nothing substantial has changed in 20 years other than better package managers. I suppose they did remove X11 but it’s trivial to install yourself.

Not GP, but usually when people talk about the "dumbing down" of macOS, they refer to new apps and GUI elements adopted from iOS. macOS as an operating system has been "completed" for about 7 years. From that point, almost all additions to it have been either focused on interoperation with the iPhone (good), or porting of entire iPhone features directly to Mac (usually very bad). Another point of view is that macOS i…

Yeah thats fair and I concur, but gp is right.

However and unfortunately I feel your last statement is spot tf on! Our only hope I guess is that they have incurred enough tech debt to be unable to enshitify themselves.

For those not in the know apple is an og hacker company, their first product was literally a blue box! Why this matters and gp is correct and why linux peeps gets in a tivvy and what stephenson was getting at with the batmobile analogy is that traditionally if hackers built something consumer facing they couldn’t help themselves but to bake in the easter eggs.

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#196

Post by kstrauser »

jlarocco wrote: post #194
kstrauser wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MacOS Sequoia supports every computer 4 years old. Almost no apps or CLI programs will absolutely require it unless they’re specifically invented to support some brand new feature. I’m running it on my 2018 Mac Mini. If you wish Apple supported computers longer, fine. I’d personally disagree because I’ve had wonderful luck with them supporting my old hardware until said hardware was so old that it was time to replace…

It's ridiculous that you would claim this isn't a problem. I'm typing this on a 12 year old MacBook Pro running Debian whose hardware perfectly fine, but hasn't been supported by Apple in years. FWIW, Debian supports it fine, though NVidia recently dropped support for the GPU in their Linux drivers. I'm going to miss it when it dies, too. Plastic Lenovos just can't compare.

I never said any such thing. I said it’s not a problem for me but that others may have a different opinion. And you could still use an older OS on that Mac; the ones it shipped with don’t magically stop working.

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#197

Post by esalman »

rewgs wrote: post #158
llm_trw wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given what OS X has become it's un-obsoleted itself again. It's kind of ironic that you're using a post from 20 years ago to invalidate an essay from 25 years ago, about an OS that's been substantially dumbed down in the last 10 years. Bad corporate blood will tell.

I will never understand the sentiment that macOS has been “dumbed down.” It’s a zsh shell with BSD utils. 99% of my shell setup/tools on Linux just work on macOS. I can easily install the gnu utils if I want 99.9% similarity. I very happily jump between macOS and Linux, and while the desktop experience is always potentially the best on Linux (IMO nothing compares to hyprland), in practice macOS feels like the most po…

You're not a typical Mac OS user. The typical users I know do not know how to use finder, let alone shell commands, to navigate file system. Personally I have no issues developing in either Mac, Linux or Windows because I'm advanced level. But for the same reason, I prefer Linux or even Windows because those provide more freedom to the developer.

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#199

Post by Animats »

jthoward64 wrote: post #175
layer8 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another point of view is that macOS is great, but all ideas that make it great come from 20 years ago, and have died at the company since then. This also applies to Windows, by the way (except it’s more like 20-30 years ago).

Whereas Linux never stopped coming up with new ideas, but doesn't have the manpower to implement them

systemd!

(Currently struggling with the way systemd inserts itself into the DNS query chain and then botches things.)

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#200

Post by Animats »

Phiwise_ wrote: post #85
GrumpyYoungMan wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Neal Stephenson acknowledged it was obsolete in 2004: " I embraced OS X as soon as it was available and have never looked back. So a lot of 'In the beginning was the command line' is now obsolete. I keep meaning to update it, but if I'm honest with myself, I have to say this is unlikely. " https://slashdot.org/story/04/10/20/1518217/neal-stephenson-... But people still dredge this quarter century old apocrypha up…

"Obsolete" is too strong a word, I think. OSX isn't an evolution of the Macintosh's operating system; That'd be Pink, which was even mentioned, and it crashed and burned. OSX was far closer to a Linux box and a Mac box on the same desk, therefore the only change really needed is to replace mentions of Unix or specifically Linux with Linux/OSX as far as the points of the piece are concerned. If Jobs had paid Torvalds…

Apple was in some ways on the right track with an OS that had no command line. Not having a command line meant you had to get serious about how to control things.

The trouble with the original MacOS was that the underlying OS was a cram job to fit into 128Kb, plus a ROM. It didn't even have a CPU dispatcher, let alone memory protection. So it scaled up badly. That was supposed to be fixed in MacOS 8, "Copeland", which actually made it out to some developers. But Copeland was killed so that Apple could hire Steve Jobs, for which Apple had to bail out the Next failure.

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