4 ms·
When the design was made, no one was considering pathology. We were all too invested in the wonder of making it all work to worry about people screwing around i
by fnj 10y ago
When the design was made, no one was considering pathology. We were all too invested in the wonder of making it all work to worry about people screwing around in crazy ways, let alone purposeful attacks.
As long as everyone recognized that putting certain characters in pathnames was counter-productive, things worked fine. Nobody ever dreamed of putting a space character in a filename when they all came from a CLI background. When barbarians came from Mac/Windows to UNIX, they lacked this background, and there went the neighborhood.
I remember being stunned when I first encountered two periods in one filename! But it only took me a few seconds to grasp the fact that period was just another character, "suffixes" were just conventions, and it all made perfect sense. OTOH, the first time somebody showed me a file named "-fr\ \*" and suggested I delete it, I got one of my first disillusionments.
P.S. - "/" is a character which is also "special" in pathnames. Actually, the particular FS may make other exceptions which are not globally enforced by the kernel. ZFS has several (such as "@").
- TeMPOraL 10y ago> When the design was made, no one was considering pathology. We were all too invested in the wonder of making it all work to worry about people screwing around in crazy ways, let alone purposeful attacks. I could buy this if not for the fact that back when UNIX was created, there were already better operating systems and sane solutions to those issues existed. It's more like that those aspects simply weren't really thought through, but instead just hacked together. Contrary to what seems to be a popular opinion nowadays, UNIX wasn't the first real operating system, just like C wasn't the first high-level programming language. I knew I actually believed the latter, due to the way C/C++ many books were written. But no, in both the worlds of programming and operating systems, there already were better thought-out solutions. It's a quirk of history that UNIX and C ended up winning.
- zzzcpan 10y ago"But no, in both the worlds of programming and operating systems, there already were better thought-out solutions." There were differently thought-out solutions, but not necessarily better or worse. Perhaps the issues they thought out didn't matter as much at the time and very unlikely to matter even a little bit today, and who knows how much they got wrong and much worse. It's very hard to speculate. But one thing I'm sure of is that these things cannot be really well designed from scratch and all the problems manifest only once they are used by people. So widely used systems can only be compared to widely used systems, not something niche or unused.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoSure, but we're not talking about niche systems. There was a whole flourishing world of computing before Unix and C came to be. In fact, a lot of significant theoretical and practical advancements came from that age. Our industry does seem to be stuck in circles, continuously forgetting the ideas of past cycles and reinventing them, only for them to be forgotten again. To see that phenomenon in action, one does not have to look much further than the last 10-15 years of history of JavaScript to see how the web ecosystem basically slowly reinvented already long established practices from desktop operating systems and GUI toolkits...
- cassowary 10y agoI don't think that's a fair characterisation of Javascript development. It's more that people gradually realised they want to do more and more. But when they've finally understood what they want to do, they quickly adopt learning from elsewhere. A lot of the latest and greatest developments (like React and Redux) are directly inspired by theoretical work.
- ktRolster 10y agoWhen the design was made, no one was considering pathology. We were all too invested in the wonder of making it all work to worry about people screwing around in crazy ways, let alone purposeful attacks Shortly after timeshare systems were created, people were thinking about security.