all of your arguments here - pro or con - are reflections of philosophy and have nothing to do with computers
> 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.
this presumes programming (which itself is simply logical thinking) is something obscure and 'scary'. Elementary school computer literacy courses in the mid-late 80s/ early 90s routinely taught more programming know-how to adolescents than college graduates have today. Is this because kids are stupid? or has the goal of curricula been relegated from 'high level understdanding and knowledge' to 'economic productivity within the present system'?
> The real effect of UNIX has been to keep programming professional and to keep user-friendly concepts well away from commercial and academic development.
really? is that why UNIX minis rapidly displaced mainframes in the late 70s/early 80s, with major advances primarily being derived from the cross-compatibility of most unix flavors being shared within industry and academia? Or is this another argument towards 'economic productivity within the current sytem' ?
> 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.
a) by evidence, you're referring to cross-linked excel spreadsheet nightmares?
b) by evidence, why does this not include all of the literally millions of interpreted
programs in say shell, awk, TCL, and so on written by unix users in professional
settings across time?
c) compare shell scripting to batch scripting. seriously. Also, the web was invented
on Unix.
d) See also use of lisp, etc. in the 80s for pretty much the same things
I argue that the issues you are speaking about here primarily derive as a result
of the workstation Unix market focusing on the higher end, while the low end grew
on the PC side - which has nothing to due with the Unix tradition itself, which
due to licensing issues with AT&T, etc. was relegated to somewhat obscurity
during the heavy capitialization of the PC market of the 80s.
> UNIX has always worked hard to be the opposite - an impenetrably hostile wall of developer exceptionalism that makes the learning curve for development so brutally steep it might as well be vertical.
Really? Is that why, from nearly day 1, the entire system was distributed on
a single tape with complete binaries, sources, and manual pages contained on
the same, self-hosting installation?
Again - while lesser users will use their knowledge of the system as some
narcissistic playing card, this is their own personality flaws being interjected
into the philosophical difference I mentioned previously (achieving knowledge vs
brutish ad-hoc productivity)
> UNIX people like to talk about commercial walled gardens as if they're the worst possible thing. But UNIX is a walled garden itself, designed - whether consciously or not - to lock out non-professional non-developer users and make sure they don't go poking at things they shouldn't try to understand.
Again, I think this supposition is derived from the growth of the commercial
Unix market, which deliberately split source code and documentation into tiny
little fragments, only some of which could be even attained in the first place,
and could only be run on proprietary hardware. Unix itself (the portable software system)
grew in a mostly obscure, tangential lineage that was then 'walled off' from naive
end users through marketing efforts of proprietary vendors. See also BSD UNIX.
> Opaque documentation, zero standardisation for command options, and ridiculous command name choices all make UNIX incredibly user hostile.
yes, things are inconsistent. but that is because the system grew organically.
I give much kudos to VMS for being very solid and coherent in this regard -
but that was just as much a walled garden as anything else, and still is (though
interesting things could still come from the OpenVMS company)
nothing precluded anyone from bolting on a coherent addon to the unix base,
and indeed many did. However they failed because unix is not a product,
but a product of organic human culture -
and so ones qualms with unix are really ones unresolved qualms with human endeavor itself.