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In Unix Everything Is a File

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Re: In Unix Everything Is a File

#51

Post by yepguy »

ernst_klim wrote: post #50
yepguy wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand why it didn't take off, but I don't think it's true that Plan 9 was just a tiny incremental improvement over UNIX's architecture. Modern networking and distributed systems would be a LOT nicer today if Plan 9 had taken off in the 90s. I think the economic benefit over today's state of affairs would have been massive, not just something that appealed to computer geeks' sense of elegance.

>if Plan 9 had taken off in the 90s Plan9 is a joke, file abstraction is a ridiculous idea. File abstraction is terrible for anything beyond storing information. It sucks for multimedia, IPC, input. Unix showed that, escaping from file abstraction in any domain (except networking, maybe). That's why we use d-bus instead of pipes, opengl instead of writing buffer etc. People need disposable, modular and introspectable…

Well my only examples were networking-related, but something like D-Bus could easily have a filesystem-based API instead. I'm willing to accept that files are a bad abstraction for graphics. I don't really know anything about that domain, but UNIX didn't get graphics right either.

Re: In Unix Everything Is a File

#52

Post by pjmlp »

yepguy wrote: post #51
ernst_klim wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>if Plan 9 had taken off in the 90s Plan9 is a joke, file abstraction is a ridiculous idea. File abstraction is terrible for anything beyond storing information. It sucks for multimedia, IPC, input. Unix showed that, escaping from file abstraction in any domain (except networking, maybe). That's why we use d-bus instead of pipes, opengl instead of writing buffer etc. People need disposable, modular and introspectable…

Well my only examples were networking-related, but something like D-Bus could easily have a filesystem-based API instead. I'm willing to accept that files are a bad abstraction for graphics. I don't really know anything about that domain, but UNIX didn't get graphics right either.

> UNIX didn't get graphics right either.

That is a bit more debatable, as X11 is not the only way to do graphics on UNIX.

I would argue that among UNIX variants, NeWS, NeXTSTEP and OS X did got graphics right.

I think X-Windows did not get graphics right

Re: In Unix Everything Is a File

#53

Post by DonHopkins »

ernst_klim wrote: post #49
DonHopkins wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One obvious problem with the book which this article demonstrates is that it leaves the reader with the mistaken impression that "In Unix Everything Is a File". I assumed this was common knowledge, but apparently not, so here goes: Another reason not to buy the book is that the author, Eric S Raymond, is a racist sexist Islamophobic conspiracy theory spreading global warming denying gun nut, who threatened to kill Br…

Your reasons are totally ad hominem and dictated by your political views and have nothing to do with the topic.

Sure they do. He asked about what was wrong with the book, which I answered. Besides the obvious factual error I pointed out (which you chose to ignore, but is literally the topic of this discussion, therefore relevant), there is the well known fact that Eric S Raymond is a racist with a long history of making ad hominem attacks against entire races and religions, as well as his personal death threat against Bruce Perens and long career of attacking Richard Stallman and the Free Software community.

I'm sorry that a single quote is just not capable of capturing the vast depth and breadth of his racism and hatred of Perens and Stallman.

Is there something you find inappropriate or annoying about me expressing my (apparently controversial) political view that racism is wrong, and quoting Eric Raymond's own words to prove he is a racist? Why is that more annoying to you than ESR's racism, threats and ad-hominem attacks themselves?

In the same vein (or bloody car seat), whenever anyone mentions the Reiser File System, the fact that he murdered his wife often comes up. Do you also find it inappropriate to mention that fact on Hacker News or Wikipedia too?

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_fil...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReiserFS

Re: In Unix Everything Is a File

#54

Post by ernst_klim »

DonHopkins wrote: post #53
ernst_klim wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your reasons are totally ad hominem and dictated by your political views and have nothing to do with the topic.

Sure they do. He asked about what was wrong with the book, which I answered. Besides the obvious factual error I pointed out (which you chose to ignore, but is literally the topic of this discussion, therefore relevant), there is the well known fact that Eric S Raymond is a racist with a long history of making ad hominem attacks against entire races and religions, as well as his personal death threat against Bruce Pe…

I don't see what Islam or irrational wiki or racism has to do with unix programming and the book. Your political beliefs contradicting with ones of the author does not make a programming book bad.

Re: In Unix Everything Is a File

#55

Post by DonHopkins »

ernst_klim wrote: post #54
DonHopkins wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure they do. He asked about what was wrong with the book, which I answered. Besides the obvious factual error I pointed out (which you chose to ignore, but is literally the topic of this discussion, therefore relevant), there is the well known fact that Eric S Raymond is a racist with a long history of making ad hominem attacks against entire races and religions, as well as his personal death threat against Bruce Pe…

I don't see what Islam or irrational wiki or racism has to do with unix programming and the book. Your political beliefs contradicting with ones of the author does not make a programming book bad.

I was directly responding to a question from somebody who didn't know about ESR. Were you previously aware of the fact that Eric Raymond is a batshit crazy racist, or did you just learn something new from me that you didn't previously know? If so, then mission accomplished! I'm glad to have opened your eyes even a little bit.

Do my political beliefs about racism being bad and obligatory to call out contradict your own beliefs, and annoy you so much that you're compelled to argue and continue to drag this out? Or do you know some actual facts you can prove about ESR that contradict the proof I posted with links and quotes? Then by all means share your proof I'm wrong, instead of stifling the discussion! Why are you so irritated and motivated to suppress those widely known facts from being mentioned on Hacker News?

If simply stating the facts and quoting ESR's own words sounds to you like an ad hominem attack, then that's ESR's problem, and maybe he should have kept his mouth shut instead of publicly saying things like "The average IQ of the Haitian population is 67... Haiti is, quite literally, a country full of violent idiots", and he exercises enough personal responsibility that he doesn't need you to bravely step up and defend his racism.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7011

Or is your real issue with the valid criticism I raised about the book (and that you awkwardly ignored and haven't countered) about "In Unix Everything Is A File" being wrong, which is LITERALLY the topic of this conversation, a point many other people are discussing, and a major mistake of the book and the article?

If you really believe that my criticism of the book in response to Lordarminius's direct question has "nothing to do with the topic", then why aren't you criticizing Lordarminius for asking me "What's wrong with the book ?"

And why aren't you arguing with all the other people here who have pointed out that the API for reading directories is different than the API for reading files, that ioctl is a kitchen sink of non-file-like operations, that many objects in the Unix kernel are simply not files, etc?

Or is it just my second criticism of ESR's racism what ticks you off so much that you totally ignored and failed to address my first criticism of his book's factual errors, and incorrectly claimed my reasons for disliking the book are "totally ad hominem"? Go re-read the very first sentence of my reply.

I don't see what ESR recasting the Jargon file to reflect his own political beliefs has to do with hacking, but that's what he did, and it's also valid to raise that point when discussing the flaws of other books he wrote.

https://news.slashdot.org/story/03/06/08/1534249/esr-recasts...

http://www.ntk.net/2003/06/06/

Re: In Unix Everything Is a File

#56

Post by DonHopkins »

pjmlp wrote: post #52
yepguy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well my only examples were networking-related, but something like D-Bus could easily have a filesystem-based API instead. I'm willing to accept that files are a bad abstraction for graphics. I don't really know anything about that domain, but UNIX didn't get graphics right either.

> UNIX didn't get graphics right either. That is a bit more debatable, as X11 is not the only way to do graphics on UNIX. I would argue that among UNIX variants, NeWS, NeXTSTEP and OS X did got graphics right. I think X-Windows did not get graphics right

Bravo! I wholeheartedly agree that X-Windows didn't get graphics right (and that you're right to refer to it by the name "X-Windows" to annoy the X-Windows Fanatics, who take it upon themselves to correct you every time you call it X-Windows)!

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-x-windows-disaster-128d39...

>X Graphics: Square Peg in a Round Hole: Programming X-Windows is like trying to find the square root of pi using roman numerals. - Unknown

As I stated before (which ernst_klim chose to ignore, but apparently strongly agrees with), Eric S Raymond was full of shit when he wrote that "in Unix everything is a file" in his terrible book "The Art of UNIX Programming", just as he was also full of shit when he wrote "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" and falsely attributed it as Linus's Law, and ESR was full of racist hatred and bullshit when he more recently wrote "The average IQ of the Haitian population is 67... Haiti is, quite literally, a country full of violent idiots" (although ernst_klim may not agree with my opinion about that ESR quote).

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7011#comment-1685142

The extensible linguistic approach that NeWS took towards a graphics API is also a great approach to a file system API, which I summarized in the recent discussion of "The everything-is-a-file principle - Linus Torvalds":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17532320

>I prefer the "everything is a computer" API. (Which happens to be Alan Kay's model of object oriented programming as message passing.)

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/4659...

>"I thought of objects being like biological cells and/or individual computers on a network, only able to communicate with messages (so messaging came at the very beginning -- it took a while to see how to do messaging in a programming language efficiently enough to be useful)." -Alan Kay

>NeFS -- aka NFS 3.0 -- used a PostScript interpreter as the file system API.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17061967

>Even 16 or so years earlier in 1990, Sun played with the idea of putting a PostScript interpreter in the SunOS kernel.

>Like NeWS was the Network extensible Window System, so NeFS was the Network extensible File System, or NFS 3.0.

>It was actually a great idea, just a wee bit before its time, and very poorly named and positioned!

>For example: If you want to make a copy of a file on the server, you can send a PostScript program that runs in the kernel and copies the file locally on the server in the kernel with ZERO context switches, instead of sending it over the net to the client, then back from the client to the server. Even if you rsh'ed the user command "cp" on the server, it would still incur context switching, but if your copy loop was running in the kernel then it didn't need to switch in and out and in and out for every block it copied.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17482780

>I disagree that history proves them wrong about Telescript. They just had the client/server relationship backwards (and asymmetrical).

>Andy Hertzfeld: "You didn't really need to do that. Just the remote procedure paradigm was good enough. Which is really what the web is based on. You don't inject code into the web to do you work for you and come back to you. You just ask a server with an http request."

>It doesn't take Yakov Smirnoff to observe that now the web injects code into you.

>The remote procedure paradigm isn't good enough. That just leads to the X-Windows Disaster.

Re: In Unix Everything Is a File

#57

Post by zmix »

techbio wrote: post #32
zmix wrote: post #19

And if you use XML, all you need to do, is to add another forward slash after the filename. And now, the network, the host and the data have become one: Everything is a node (or an atomic value). But hey, that's stupid. Let's not do that...!

By way of XPath. I don't disagree but--that's stupid because of... using XML at all? Complications of altering/documenting ad hoc taxonomies? Mixing paradigms under a unified syntax? Something else?

Would you mind giving me the one or other example? Or references to some documents about this (in regard to XML), that I could reach?
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