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> So I don't understand how anyone could be passionate about it, except maybe to passionately question why we're fine with continuing to do things this way, in

> So I don't understand how anyone could be passionate about it, except maybe to passionately question why we're fine with continuing to do things this way, instead of stepping back and after a sober thought concluding that this whole thing is pretty silly. Most systems programmers are bought all the way into the Unix/worse-is-better mindset and are too afraid to ever question whether things could be designed with proper abstractions.

yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
> too afraid to ever question whether things could be designed with proper abstractions. That's fairly arrogant. Have you ever considered that we simply looked at the alternatives, observed the hell that followed, and beat a hasty retreat to well-tested abstractions that have withstood generations of change? It's not like nobody's ever tried anything else: NT, Haiku, parts of Darwin, various experimental research systems... really, if you want the anti-unix, go use Microsoft's stuff. OLE, COM, etc; nothing's a file, everything does more than one thing (poorly), they gave up on the legacy of teletype long ago. But no, we're not huddled in the corner afraid of the world because our stuff sucks so terribly, we're relying on simple, composable layers because everything else breaks when you try to scale it up.
- _ibu9 9y ago
  By criticizing Unix I did not mean look at Windows etc.... There are systems which take the good parts of the Unix philosophy (composability, uniformity) but abandon the bad parts (text, hierarchical files, mutability, the name based permission model, etc.). There are various research crowds such as the FP and capabilities people are usually at the forefront of this but the research to production cycle is very long since Unix is entrenched. In my experience a lot of systems programmers are reactionaries and make this cycle longer than it should be, but that is the subjective part.

yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago

> too afraid to ever question whether things could be designed with proper abstractions. That's fairly arrogant. Have you ever considered that we simply looked at the alternatives, observed the hell that followed, and beat a hasty retreat to well-tested abstractions that have withstood generations of change? It's not like nobody's ever tried anything else: NT, Haiku, parts of Darwin, various experimental research systems... really, if you want the anti-unix, go use Microsoft's stuff. OLE, COM, etc; nothing's a file, everything does more than one thing (poorly), they gave up on the legacy of teletype long ago. But no, we're not huddled in the corner afraid of the world because our stuff sucks so terribly, we're relying on simple, composable layers because everything else breaks when you try to scale it up.

_ibu9 9y ago
By criticizing Unix I did not mean look at Windows etc.... There are systems which take the good parts of the Unix philosophy (composability, uniformity) but abandon the bad parts (text, hierarchical files, mutability, the name based permission model, etc.). There are various research crowds such as the FP and capabilities people are usually at the forefront of this but the research to production cycle is very long since Unix is entrenched. In my experience a lot of systems programmers are reactionaries and make this cycle longer than it should be, but that is the subjective part.