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How did you draw the conclusion that I conflate UNIX and computer science? UNIX was developed by computer scientists with formal education in computing theory

How did you draw the conclusion that I conflate UNIX and computer science? UNIX was developed by computer scientists with formal education in computing theory and algorithms, on top of those people inventing some of the algorithms and data structures which are still taught in formal computer science today, and for a good reason. Then the work was taken up by engineers with formal education in the same. But how is that conflating an operating environment (not even an operating system, but an operating environment) with computer science? What the hell... The success of GNU is built on ignorance -- then-teenagers fresh out of high school downloading ISO's on their P.C. buckets because they didn't even know there is such a thing as a UNIX workstation, or thinking they couldn't afford one (which wasn't true, as older systems could be had for a bargain). They could have just as easily downloaded NetBSD or FreeBSD but didn't because they didn't know any better. Even today the entire hype is based on not knowing any better (why are we still running Linux, eh?) That's not something to be proud of, but I suppose it does "speak for itself" in a way.

tathougies 8y ago
Your complaint about GNU was that it departed from the UNIX philosophy of one tool doing one thing, and then contrasted that philosophy with what 'real' computer scientists do. Last I checked, there is no 'rule' in computer science that tools must do one thing. GNU is not Unix, as the name so clearly articulates, so other than your seeming complaint that 'real' computer scientists always write Unix-style utilities, I'm not sure how your criticism of GNU tools doing more than one thing is at all relevant. FreeBSD was released in 1993, and NetBSD in the same year. BSD as a whole only went from a proprietary distribtuion to open source in that year. GNU was started in 1983, thus making even that criticism of GNU completely unfounded.
tellak 8y ago
Ignorance or not, the success of GNU (such as supplying the C compiler used in your BSD darlings) was put into place by people in their 20s-40s mostly. Long before any high schooler could afford a CD burner let alone wait to download an ISO. The most prolific GNU contributors have CS backgrounds from backwaters institutions like MIT, CMU and Stanford and we’re pushing greybeard status in the 90s. Your narrative is based on pure make believe. Redhat, SUSE, and IBM... bash them all you want, are not high school side projects.

tathougies 8y ago

Your complaint about GNU was that it departed from the UNIX philosophy of one tool doing one thing, and then contrasted that philosophy with what 'real' computer scientists do. Last I checked, there is no 'rule' in computer science that tools must do one thing. GNU is not Unix, as the name so clearly articulates, so other than your seeming complaint that 'real' computer scientists always write Unix-style utilities, I'm not sure how your criticism of GNU tools doing more than one thing is at all relevant. FreeBSD was released in 1993, and NetBSD in the same year. BSD as a whole only went from a proprietary distribtuion to open source in that year. GNU was started in 1983, thus making even that criticism of GNU completely unfounded.

tellak 8y ago

Ignorance or not, the success of GNU (such as supplying the C compiler used in your BSD darlings) was put into place by people in their 20s-40s mostly. Long before any high schooler could afford a CD burner let alone wait to download an ISO. The most prolific GNU contributors have CS backgrounds from backwaters institutions like MIT, CMU and Stanford and we’re pushing greybeard status in the 90s. Your narrative is based on pure make believe. Redhat, SUSE, and IBM... bash them all you want, are not high school side projects.