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I admire Unix, but I also feel things are getting old. I have a minimal Unix setup, with lots of little programs that do one thing and do it well. For example,

by nextos 10y ago

I admire Unix, but I also feel things are getting old. I have a minimal Unix setup, with lots of little programs that do one thing and do it well. For example, mutt is my MUA (mail user agent). It just reads my emails, but fetching or sending is carried out by other programs. Fine. Now, the issue is that every little Unix utility that is non-trivial comes with its own little DSL for configuration. Most are inflexible, naive and different to each other. It's hard to script mutt. If you want to do some stuff the author hasn't planned for, you are better off patching the code. Flexibility, and composability, is not as good as they preach. For this reason, I am migrating everything to emacs. It offers me what Unix only promises but falls short at. Everything is an elisp function and thus easy to combine. Things are more organic. And still minimal.

pjmlp 10y ago
> I admire Unix, but I also feel things are getting old. " We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy." Rob Pike, https://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob-pike-responds https://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob-p...
- nextos 10y ago
  Yes, it's a very good quote. It's sad most Plan 9 and Inferno innovations, just to name two further developments of Unix, have been ignored. But overall, I am more comfortable on live environments like Smalltalk or Emacs. There's just one fundamental abstraction, and things can be composed beautifully. In Unix, on the other hand, everything is not a file. And even if it was, little applications like mutt are silos. The code is static, it can't be easily changed or opened. A file interface, in the form of STDIN/STDOUT is too unstructured.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    > But overall, I am more comfortable on live environments like Smalltalk or Emacs. After Amiga, Atari, Acorn and Windows, getting to learn UNIX ideas seemed quite interesting (I started with Xenix). However, once at the university I got the opportunity to dive into the work of Xerox PARC and ETHZ, the more I learned about them, the more I came to realize that I actually cared more about their vision about how computing should look like, than anything I ever used in UNIX variants. Of course, Plan 9, Inferno and C+@ are other Bell Labs ideas that would have improved the overall UNIX experience, but as you say, have been ignored.

by nextos 10y ago

pjmlp 10y ago

> I admire Unix, but I also feel things are getting old. " We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy." Rob Pike, https://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob-pike-responds https://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob-p...

nextos 10y ago
Yes, it's a very good quote. It's sad most Plan 9 and Inferno innovations, just to name two further developments of Unix, have been ignored. But overall, I am more comfortable on live environments like Smalltalk or Emacs. There's just one fundamental abstraction, and things can be composed beautifully. In Unix, on the other hand, everything is not a file. And even if it was, little applications like mutt are silos. The code is static, it can't be easily changed or opened. A file interface, in the form of STDIN/STDOUT is too unstructured.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  > But overall, I am more comfortable on live environments like Smalltalk or Emacs. After Amiga, Atari, Acorn and Windows, getting to learn UNIX ideas seemed quite interesting (I started with Xenix). However, once at the university I got the opportunity to dive into the work of Xerox PARC and ETHZ, the more I learned about them, the more I came to realize that I actually cared more about their vision about how computing should look like, than anything I ever used in UNIX variants. Of course, Plan 9, Inferno and C+@ are other Bell Labs ideas that would have improved the overall UNIX experience, but as you say, have been ignored.