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The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

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Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#41

Post by eternalban »

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 A great deal of it is outdated or simply wrong, but it does have a running theme of a prediction that has largely been borne out: people assuming that all Unix's flaws are actually virtues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…

> flaws are actually virtues and that if you don't think so, then you Just Don't Get It.

Hey, that sounds like Go's line. Oh wait ..

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#42

Post by richardwhiuk »

__jal wrote: post #34
jff wrote: post #16

Although I agree that Unix is a big collection of hacks and well past its prime, the author displays several fundamental misconceptions of what he's talking about. Here's a few examples: - Dirty hacks in UNIX started to arise when UNIX was released, and it was long before Windows came to the scene, I guess there wasn’t even Microsoft DOS at the time (I guess and I don’t bother to check, so check it yourself). At leas…

> What would you name 'grep' instead? Yeah, I found that one an especially weird gripe. Grepping was a new thing, so we needed a word for it. 'Grep' is short, easy to say and type, and relatively hard to confuse with similar words in the domain. Works for me. I can unfortunately imagine a modern startup implementing it, and shudder at potential names my imagination is coming up with... Searchlr, the best way to searc…

search?

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#43

Post by tannhaeuser »

CalChris wrote: post #22
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 A great deal of it is outdated or simply wrong, but it does have a running theme of a prediction that has largely been borne out: people assuming that all Unix's flaws are actually virtues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…

I did not know about this! http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf It even has an anti-foreword by Dennis Ritchie which kinda reminds me of the Metropolitan Police spokesman's blurb on the back of Banksy's book. BTW, it starts off with an anonymous quote that I've never heard, Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. Unix is of course from Bell Labs. And anyone who knew anything would have said i…

And LSD is of course from Albert Hofmann

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Hofmann

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#44

Post by jff »

bch wrote: post #40

> Some people think that UNIX is great and perfect "...great and perfect" is a strawman. Whether "some people" think that is irrelevant. Some of this article is interesting, but the fact of the matter is 40-year-old systems have signs of being 40 years old. If "fixing" everything were easy, it'd be done. Tabs in Makefiles throw off the uninitiated for 10 minutes, then they learn, shrug and move on. These scars and st…

Regarding 'ls', I ran "strace ls" on Linux and didn't see any open on /etc/password; it's important that you run 'ls -l', which should trigger the /etc/password access because it has to map UIDs to usernames.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#46

Post by pjmlp »

Animats wrote: post #33

There are many early UNIX design decisions that have outlived their shelf life by decades. Probably the biggest one is that UNIX is, at bottom, a terminal-oriented multi-user time sharing system. This maps badly to desktop, mobile, and server systems. The protection model is a mismatch for all those purposes. (Programs have the authority of the user. Not so good today as in the 1970s.) The administration model also m…

Hence why UNIX on mobile is a Pyrrhic victory, as iOS, Android, ChromeOS rely on Objective-C, Java and JavaScript runtimes and their respective frameworks, just with good enough support from POSIX, that could be replaced by what is expected from any ANSI C implementation.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#48

Post by nanodano »

randcraw wrote: post #7
Philipp__ wrote: post #2

"Have you ever kissed a girl?"

Exactly. Waayyy TMII (irrelevant). If the bottom-up compositional model for computing that largely originated with Unix is fading, this article doesn't go there, or suggest cause. Now, that's an article I'd like to read...

I wonder why the original comment you responded to got flagged. I read it and it was one of the best comments?

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#49

Post by pjmlp »

"We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy."

Rob Pike 2004, https://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob-p...

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#50

Post by bch »

jff wrote: post #44
bch wrote: post #40

> Some people think that UNIX is great and perfect "...great and perfect" is a strawman. Whether "some people" think that is irrelevant. Some of this article is interesting, but the fact of the matter is 40-year-old systems have signs of being 40 years old. If "fixing" everything were easy, it'd be done. Tabs in Makefiles throw off the uninitiated for 10 minutes, then they learn, shrug and move on. These scars and st…

Regarding 'ls', I ran "strace ls" on Linux and didn't see any open on /etc/password; it's important that you run 'ls -l', which should trigger the /etc/password access because it has to map UIDs to usernames.

re: "ls -l" understood. I ran "ls -ld ."
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