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Reading the article it's tempting to say sometimes it borders on ridiculousness :) . > No one, in the Unix world, ever complained about the Unix's missed promi
by avmich 10y ago
Reading the article it's tempting to say sometimes it borders on ridiculousness :) .
> No one, in the Unix world, ever complained about the Unix's missed promise about file abstraction.
The whole world, sans programmers, keeps moaning on complexity of computers, and Unix, and how hard it is to learn all those arcane commands and abstractions and why things can't be just plain and simple. I'll skip rants about how it's related to file abstractions :) .
Being fully aware how the same things could look very different from different angles, I'd still maintain the "not broken - don't fix" approach has been countered then and now.
- pjmlp 10y agoThe UNIX haters book is a good example. And I coming from the world of Amiga and Windows, after a decade mostly spent on UNIX land, have returned mostly to Windows world in the last 6 years. The world has gone UNIX because it was free and for free stuff, everyone is willing to live with some warts. Had AT&T been able to sell it in first place, it probably would not have spread as it did.
- kgwgk 10y agoNot only because it was free, but also because "worse is better". Unix and C are the ultimate computer viruses. ["The Rise of Worse is Better" by Richard P. Gabriel, included in "The UNIX-HATERS Handbook"]
- pjmlp 10y agoYeah, now all the people that make money out of security related work and tooling are thankful that they spread like that.
- 1ris 10y agoWhile UNIX has it's downsides and I have seen beautiful non UNIX OSes such as OS/2, most non-unix oses simply suck, too, and usually more.
- yuhong 10y agoThis reminds me of my Blue Box on NuKernel idea, the idea being to later implement the Mac OS APIs in separate processes outside the box. One interesting thing it did was to use Pascal strings.
- kgwgk 10y agoWhat operating systems do you have in mind? The only remaining systems (outside of academia/research) which are not based on unix seem to be windows, openvms and os/z. Edit: thanks pjmlp. With so many name changes I forgot that IBM still had an alternative OS for small computers. I imagined that maybe there were still other mainframe systems, but I was too lazy to check...
- pjmlp 10y agoYou forgot IBM i (aka OS/400) and Unisys MCP (aka Burroughs B5000) and the myriad of embedded and real time OSes or bare metal runtimes.
- nickpsecurity 10y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10957020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10957020 Far as surviving ones, Burroughs MCP and GCOS are still around. BeOS is being cloned by Haiku. Amigas are still around with MorphOS being good. eComstation maintains OS/2. The THEOS OS and GEM(?) window system still exist. Plan 9 of course. GenodeOS continues microkernel-style tradition. JX continues language-style security trend. Oberon legacy last iterated as A2 Bluebottle OS. So, there's several I recall.
- kgwgk 10y agoThanks. Apart from the mainframe systems, the ones having experienced commercial/industrial success in your list are either life-extension efforts to support niche users or are clones of the actual thing developed by hobbyists. Maybe they would suck less than unix if they had seen in the last 20 years a fraction of the development behind unix operating systems. By the way, you forgot to include FreeDOS (I don't know if DR-DOS is still alive).
- MustardTiger 10y ago>The whole world, sans programmers, keeps moaning on complexity of computers, and Unix, and how hard it is to learn all those arcane commands and abstractions and why things can't be just plain and simple. I'll skip rants about how it's related to file abstractions It says "no one, in the unix world". People outside of the unix world are not in the unix world. The point is, unix became very popular despite being bad (or perhaps because of being bad). Even within unix, the worse a system is, the more popular it is in general (see a typical linux distro full of randomly tossed together junk).
- zxcvcxz 10y ago> the worse a system is, the more popular it is in general That's true of non-unixy systems too, see: Windows. And by that same logic, OS X is the worst Unix. A whole bunch of tools thrown together is pretty much the definition of an operating system.
- rayiner 10y agoOS X is not the worst UNIX. Darwin is kind of a shit kernel, but the user land is way more sensibly designed than your typical Linux distro (which is, as OP said, a random collection of junk).
- tptacek 10y agoFor desktops systems, maybe, but there's a reason almost nobody delivers SAAS stuff on Darwin, even as some do deliver on Windows.
- iris-digital 10y agoExcept for package management.
- rayiner 10y agoDon't agree. Self contained app bundles are great. I use homebrew for some stuff and dependencies are a PITA. E.g. multiple incompatible Python versions.
- pcwalton 10y ago> The whole world, sans programmers, keeps moaning on complexity of computers, and Unix, and how hard it is to learn all those arcane commands and abstractions and why things can't be just plain and simple. I'll skip rants about how it's related to file abstractions :) . There are a lot of things about Plan 9 that really aren't that good in 2016. The compiler, for example, lacks a modern optimization pipeline and generates code that is unacceptably slow by modern standards. The windowing system is not a compositing window manager; it's a '90s design through and through and cannot perform as well as solutions like Wayland (that are arguably simpler). The browser doesn't support dynamic changes and would have to be rearchitected to support anything more than simple pages with acceptable performance. None of this is meant to bash the great work that the Plan 9 team did while at Bell Labs/Lucent, mind you. With the team they had they did a really great job, and they're all top-notch developers. I only want to counter the notion that Plan 9 is all around a technically better OS than the ones we use today. It isn't. As sad as it sounds, most complexity exists for a reason. There is a good amount of cruft that could be dropped if not for backwards compatibility, but when e.g. compilers are concerned, you depend on that complexity for performance.
- IshKebab 10y ago> There are a lot of things about Plan 9 that really aren't that good in 2016. Well yeah, that's because Plan 9 wasn't written in 2016 and hasn't been kept up to date. I don't think anyone claimed otherwise. It doesn't invalidate the point that people do want a simpler OS that isn't as crazy and hodge-podgey as Unix. They just don't want it as much as they want compatibility with old software. Think how hard a sell Windows 10 would be if it didn't run software written for Windows 7. Literally no-one would use it. That doesn't mean it isn't better.
- f2f 10y ago> The windowing system is not a compositing window manager 8½ perhaps wasn't, but Rio is a compositing window manager.
- pcwalton 10y agoNot in the modern sense of compositing GPU buffers.
- coldtea 10y ago>The whole world, sans programmers, keeps moaning on complexity of computers, and Unix, and how hard it is to learn all those arcane commands and abstractions and why things can't be just plain and simple. Which is orthogonal to a broken filesystem abstraction here and there. Besides the plan 9 userland was hardly different or better in that aspect.