4 ms·

I don't think Rob meant stability. Rob was probably referring to the reality that modern Linux hasn't innovated itself past SVR4 by any appreciable amount. We

I don't think Rob meant stability. Rob was probably referring to the reality that modern Linux hasn't innovated itself past SVR4 by any appreciable amount. We are still using X, still using terminals powered by control codes, etc. Rob probably sees things like LANG and LC_ALL as bugs. His fix was UTF-8 everywhere, always. Where is Linux? Still in bag-of-bytes-o-rama.

kazinator 11y ago
I agree with Rob's "UTF-8 everywhere". I took this approach in the TXR language. Its I/O streams output and input UTF-8, and only that. Period. (There is no virtual switch for alternative encodings.) Internally, everything is a wide character code point. I do not call the "fuck my C program function" known as setlocale, and no behavior related to character handling or localization is influenced by magic environment strings. LANG and LC_ALL are the work of ISO C and POSIX; they are not the fault of Linux. Linux has these in the name of compliance; they were foisted upon the free word, essentially.
SixSigma 11y ago
That and getting rid of the TTY altogether. We aren't using punched cards EDIT: people hate when I say this, which amuses me. The TTY must die !!!!
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- nils-m-holm 11y ago
  > The TTY must die!!!! Being sight-impaired, I have to disagree strongly! The TTY is the only thing that lets me adjust the font size of all programs running in it without going through lots of trouble. (BTW: didn't downvote your comment.)
  - guard-of-terra 11y ago
    Browsers let you do that. KDE also does, so do other environments. For a quick hack, set your sceen DPI to 50.
    - nils-m-holm 11y ago
      Set your minimum font size to 32 points and browse the web for a while! Let me know how it feels!
      - guard-of-terra 11y ago
        Browsers can set default zoom, not just font size.
        nils-m-holm 11y ago
        Doesn't help. When the zoom factor is big enough, you have to scroll sideways while reading. Anyway, I have tried a lot of things over the years and nothing even comes close to using a text interface. To name a few nuisances: controls moving outside of the screen, overlapping elements in web content, unreadable buttons, unclickable input fields, tiny fonts in menus, etc. Nothing of this happens with text interfaces. Thanks for your input, though!
        guard-of-terra 11y ago
        For reading, consider installing beeline reader (yes the name is stupid-ish), in plugin or bookmarklet form.
  - SixSigma 11y ago
    Plan9 has an environment variable $font that sets the system font for everything. The windowing system can even start inside one of its own windows so you can have different fonts for different sets of programs, all settable at runtime. The TTY must die.
- plugnburn 11y ago
  Seems like your mouse never broke (or, if you have a wireless one, the battery in it has never died, and if it did, you could immediately replace it). Or are you the type that does everything on a touchscreen? Because, judging from your logic, traditional computer controls must die too...
  - SixSigma 11y ago
    The high frequency of mouse failure, the high cost of downtime and the low price of mice suggest that having spare mice makes sense. By your logic, I would be stranded at the side of the road wishing I had a spare tyre.
    - plugnburn 11y ago
      That's not quite a correct analogy because modern systems allow you to do things without mouse. Still there are some individuals that obviously strive to take those possibilities away and make a mouse like a tyre. I'm really happy it's not the case yet.
- kiiski 11y ago
  Personally I like doing text-only work (such as programming) in a TTY with Emacs. I'd like to have a machine with no X at all, but unfortunately there aren't many good framebuffer-friendly graphical tools (fbi is good for viewing images, but doesn't support gifs; vlc is ok for playing videos, but the ncurses UI is too buggy; most modern websites are barely usable with links2, while netsurf is too mouse-oriented for my tastes).
- pjc50 11y ago
  How do you operate a command line without something similar to the tty? Windows doesn't have a tty-style interface, and as a result its command prompt has been even more primitive. (Powershell ISE is something else .. once it actually loads)
pilif 11y ago
>Rob probably sees things like LANG and LC_ALL as bugs. His fix was UTF-8 everywhere, always The problems solved by LANG or LC_ALL are not solved by UTF8 alone. Even if you use UTF8 for all your input and output, there is still the question of how to format numbers and dates to the user and how to collate strings. These things are dependent on country and language, sometimes even varying between different places in a single country (in Switzerland, the German speaking parts use . As the decimal separator, while the French speaking part prefers ,) These things are entirely independent of the encoding of your strings and they still need to be defined. Also, because it's a very common thing that basically needs to happen with every application, this is also something the user very likely prefers to set only once at one place. Environment variables don't feel too bad a place.
- plugnburn 11y ago
  Here in ex-USSR we have those problems too. Why not standardize decimal separators altogether worldwide? We're not dealing with feeking paper handwriting! If a number is printed on a computer display, it must look like 123456.78, not like "123 456,78"! Same goes for datetime representation. This localization BS has spawned an entire race of nonsense, where, for example, CSV files are not actually CSV in some regions, because their values are not COMMA-separated (as the name implies), but semicolon-separated. And we, programmers, have to deal with it somehow, not to mention some obsolete Faildows encodings like CP1251 still widely used here in lots of tech-slowpoke organizations. So: one encoding, one datetime format, one numeric format for the world and for the win. Heil UTF-8!
  - pilif 11y ago
    >not to mention some obsolete Faildows encodings like CP1251 still widely used here in lots of tech-slowpoke organizations. as we're talking encodings: The worst file I ever had to deal with combined, within one file, UTF-8, cp437 and cp850. I guess they had DOS and Unix machines bot no Windows boxes touching that file. This is a problem that won't go away. Many developers are not aware of how character encoding, let alone Unicode, actually works and, what's the worst about this mess, many times, they can get away without knowing.
  - 11y ago

kazinator 11y ago

I agree with Rob's "UTF-8 everywhere". I took this approach in the TXR language. Its I/O streams output and input UTF-8, and only that. Period. (There is no virtual switch for alternative encodings.) Internally, everything is a wide character code point. I do not call the "fuck my C program function" known as setlocale, and no behavior related to character handling or localization is influenced by magic environment strings. LANG and LC_ALL are the work of ISO C and POSIX; they are not the fault of Linux. Linux has these in the name of compliance; they were foisted upon the free word, essentially.

SixSigma 11y ago

That and getting rid of the TTY altogether. We aren't using punched cards EDIT: people hate when I say this, which amuses me. The TTY must die !!!!

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
nils-m-holm 11y ago
> The TTY must die!!!! Being sight-impaired, I have to disagree strongly! The TTY is the only thing that lets me adjust the font size of all programs running in it without going through lots of trouble. (BTW: didn't downvote your comment.)
- guard-of-terra 11y ago
  Browsers let you do that. KDE also does, so do other environments. For a quick hack, set your sceen DPI to 50.
  - nils-m-holm 11y ago
    Set your minimum font size to 32 points and browse the web for a while! Let me know how it feels!
    - guard-of-terra 11y ago
      Browsers can set default zoom, not just font size.
      - nils-m-holm 11y ago
        Doesn't help. When the zoom factor is big enough, you have to scroll sideways while reading. Anyway, I have tried a lot of things over the years and nothing even comes close to using a text interface. To name a few nuisances: controls moving outside of the screen, overlapping elements in web content, unreadable buttons, unclickable input fields, tiny fonts in menus, etc. Nothing of this happens with text interfaces. Thanks for your input, though!
        guard-of-terra 11y ago
        For reading, consider installing beeline reader (yes the name is stupid-ish), in plugin or bookmarklet form.
- SixSigma 11y ago
  Plan9 has an environment variable $font that sets the system font for everything. The windowing system can even start inside one of its own windows so you can have different fonts for different sets of programs, all settable at runtime. The TTY must die.
plugnburn 11y ago
Seems like your mouse never broke (or, if you have a wireless one, the battery in it has never died, and if it did, you could immediately replace it). Or are you the type that does everything on a touchscreen? Because, judging from your logic, traditional computer controls must die too...
- SixSigma 11y ago
  The high frequency of mouse failure, the high cost of downtime and the low price of mice suggest that having spare mice makes sense. By your logic, I would be stranded at the side of the road wishing I had a spare tyre.
  - plugnburn 11y ago
    That's not quite a correct analogy because modern systems allow you to do things without mouse. Still there are some individuals that obviously strive to take those possibilities away and make a mouse like a tyre. I'm really happy it's not the case yet.
kiiski 11y ago
Personally I like doing text-only work (such as programming) in a TTY with Emacs. I'd like to have a machine with no X at all, but unfortunately there aren't many good framebuffer-friendly graphical tools (fbi is good for viewing images, but doesn't support gifs; vlc is ok for playing videos, but the ncurses UI is too buggy; most modern websites are barely usable with links2, while netsurf is too mouse-oriented for my tastes).
pjc50 11y ago
How do you operate a command line without something similar to the tty? Windows doesn't have a tty-style interface, and as a result its command prompt has been even more primitive. (Powershell ISE is something else .. once it actually loads)

pilif 11y ago

>Rob probably sees things like LANG and LC_ALL as bugs. His fix was UTF-8 everywhere, always The problems solved by LANG or LC_ALL are not solved by UTF8 alone. Even if you use UTF8 for all your input and output, there is still the question of how to format numbers and dates to the user and how to collate strings. These things are dependent on country and language, sometimes even varying between different places in a single country (in Switzerland, the German speaking parts use . As the decimal separator, while the French speaking part prefers ,) These things are entirely independent of the encoding of your strings and they still need to be defined. Also, because it's a very common thing that basically needs to happen with every application, this is also something the user very likely prefers to set only once at one place. Environment variables don't feel too bad a place.

plugnburn 11y ago
Here in ex-USSR we have those problems too. Why not standardize decimal separators altogether worldwide? We're not dealing with feeking paper handwriting! If a number is printed on a computer display, it must look like 123456.78, not like "123 456,78"! Same goes for datetime representation. This localization BS has spawned an entire race of nonsense, where, for example, CSV files are not actually CSV in some regions, because their values are not COMMA-separated (as the name implies), but semicolon-separated. And we, programmers, have to deal with it somehow, not to mention some obsolete Faildows encodings like CP1251 still widely used here in lots of tech-slowpoke organizations. So: one encoding, one datetime format, one numeric format for the world and for the win. Heil UTF-8!
- pilif 11y ago
  >not to mention some obsolete Faildows encodings like CP1251 still widely used here in lots of tech-slowpoke organizations. as we're talking encodings: The worst file I ever had to deal with combined, within one file, UTF-8, cp437 and cp850. I guess they had DOS and Unix machines bot no Windows boxes touching that file. This is a problem that won't go away. Many developers are not aware of how character encoding, let alone Unicode, actually works and, what's the worst about this mess, many times, they can get away without knowing.
- 11y ago