Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

kukuruku.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 616 posts

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#451

Post by qznc »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #156

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 y…

The fact that it was awesome in the 70's does not change the fact that it is broken today.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#452

Post by arca_vorago »

sowhatquestion wrote: post #363
ChuckMcM wrote: post #156

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 y…

> 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 True enough, but as a younger programmer, I find it pretty reasonable to look back at computer systems of the 70s and wonder if we can do better today . I feel a little bit gross every time I have to write a bash sh…

As a sysadmin I just want to say I love bash. I'm not a programmer, but I get shit done in it all the time, and it's easy to understand and fix errors later. I have read every single why bash is bad article and I find all of them wanting for better arguments.

On the windows side, power shell.

And keep in mind, many of these scripts have been running for 10+ years. When's the last time you wrote a piece of software that worked for 10 years with minimal or no update?

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#454

Post by jstimpfle »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #448
jstimpfle wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There exists a shared protocol. It's called "explain it". But that's typically not even needed, the user can just look at the data and figure it out. > With typical Unix tools, you don't have "simpler encodings", you have no encoding at all. You don't even believe this yourself, do you? That's so obviously wrong. Name a well-thought out text file format that can't correctly be parsed e.g. by a Python one-liner with b…

> Name a well-thought out text file format that can't correctly be parsed e.g. by a Python one-liner with basic string operations. And please don't include: JSON, XML, YAML, sexps, because it's not possible, at least not without a library. Well, because this library should be a part of the OS API. A set of conrete cases where existing practice is bad is Unix itself (and its descendants). Think of every time a script…

> because every program has to contain its own, half-assed parser for textual data.

As I said, name me a format that I can't parse correctly as a Python one-liner.

I work as a systems administrator and my scripts (mostly shell, python) don't break. I'm not kidding you.

Of course when writing shell scripts (which I think you imply) I need to know how to write non-broken shell scripts (in a clean and straightforward way) and I will freely admit that it's not easy to learn how to do it. Partly because shell has some flaws, but more because of the insane amount of broken scripts and tutorials out there.

But it's not even about defending shell. We are talking about text representation.

> Well, because this library should be a part of the OS API.

You are free to postulate that but it's won't make it less work. By the way "OS API" is ridiculous. These libraries have to be implemented for every language (and they have been, for most popular languages).

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#455

Post by jstimpfle »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #449
jstimpfle wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed my cynism. I was opposed to these formats in the first place.

Which seems at odds with the thesis, at least as far as I can figure it out.

Look again. For example I wrote "space-separated" in multiple places.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#456

Post by markhahn »

sowhatquestion wrote: post #363
ChuckMcM wrote: post #156

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 y…

> 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 True enough, but as a younger programmer, I find it pretty reasonable to look back at computer systems of the 70s and wonder if we can do better today . I feel a little bit gross every time I have to write a bash sh…

bash vs yml has always been there. you're really saying "declarative vs imperative" - not news. this is relevant, though, because Unix has always been about tools and composition, which is indeed dependent on imperative expression. if you feel dirty describing how (imperative), then maybe you're in the wrong business and should stick to the declarative world.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#457

Post by leoc »

rbanffy wrote: post #429
inkyoto wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most important thing about UNIX - no matter how simplistic (or not) it might appear or how significant (or not) the perceived flaws might seem - is that a move to UNIX back in 70s-80s was liberating with its simplicity and human friendliness for so many of those coming the world of closed-off, proprietary operating systems, walled gardens, development tools and kernel API’s. Writing a mere string out to a file on…

I remember people saying Unix was the gold standard of user-hostile operating system. That was well before I met AS/400 and MVS. And then I had contact with a Burroughs A-series and it's appropriately named OS, MCP. OTOH, I love the 3270s.

TRON's MCP was named after Burroughs', I'm quite sure. Guess who TRON/Alan Bradley was based on? :)

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#458

Post by cat199 »

sowhatquestion wrote: post #363
ChuckMcM wrote: post #156

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 y…

> 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 True enough, but as a younger programmer, I find it pretty reasonable to look back at computer systems of the 70s and wonder if we can do better today . I feel a little bit gross every time I have to write a bash sh…

> In other words, if you couldn't justify something being designed a certain way de novo, why be content with the existing design!?

Not justifying it designed this way today and keeping a false traditionalist position to retroactively-self justify it is no worse than berating something designed at the state-of-the-art at the time with no contextual understanding of why it was done that way... it is quite possible to evolve designs within a tradition of understanding their origins rather than being a smug neophyte who self-admittedly is responding out of ones own ignorance yet choosing to still berate despite this ignorance 'because who even knows why but it seems old man'

see also: just about any incremental improvement in any long running system ever, over time, across all systems, from the dawn of time, up until today

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#459

Post by markhahn »

rusk wrote: post #398
pcwalton wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Besides, who is to tell that the newer design will be better? As much as it's popular to think otherwise, this isn't true. Taken as a whole, newer things are more often than not better than older things. For example, cryptography has been on a huge march upward since the days of Unix crypt().

I have a shining counterexample to your thesis: https://arstechnica.com/apple/2015/01/why-dns-in-os-x-10-10-is-broken-and-what-you-can-do-to-fix-it/ In almost all my experiences reimplementing established software in a commercial environment "building a better wheel" has met with failure. Or in the very least it took some time to get it back to a level of acceptable that our customers were happy with. This idea that…

Apple is in the vanguard of only one thing: marketing.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#460

Post by zeptomu »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #294
hinkley wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Occasionally when I run out of analogies for why convoluted systems are not 'flexible', I reach for a half-remembered homage, that I encountered as a teenager, about the Chevy Straight 6. This was not a fancy engine. It was not a particularly powerful engine. Not a single thing on it or about it was exceptional. Because it was easy to work on and with add-ons and modifications it could be coaxed into doing things it…

The single most disastrous failing of UNIX is the assumption that everyone wants to be a programmer - or if they don't want to be a programmer, they damn well should become a programmer anyway. It's nonsense. Programming as it's done today - which is strongly influenced by UNIX ideas - is the last thing most users want to do. They have absolutely no interest in the concepts, the ideas, the assumptions, the mindset, t…

> UNIX set human-accessible computing back by decades. [...]

I do not agree at all. Closed-garden non-free eco systems like Windows set back computing.

> Programming could have been made much more accessible, and there's consistent evidence from BASIC, Hypercard, VBA, the HTML web, and even Delphi (at a push) that the more accessible a development environment is made, the more non-developers will use it to get fun and/or useful things done.

So why are they not going strong? There are implementations for BASIC for most systems and even Delphi is still available.

> [...] But UNIX is a walled garden itself, designed - whether consciously or not - to lock out non-professional non-developer users [...]

Assuming with UNIX you mean implementations today (like Linux) this is not true at all.

I do not want to say Unix (with BSDs and Linux today) is the absolute best we can do, but I am pretty sure that it is on a local optimum in the operating systems space.

Post reply on HN