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"Unix was never a good design" Nothing's perfect. Unix was a great design that served its purpose well for a long time, and evolved a bit along the way. Saying
by jaas 7y ago
"Unix was never a good design"
Nothing's perfect. Unix was a great design that served its purpose well for a long time, and evolved a bit along the way. Saying it was "never good" is trivializing and, in my opinion, arrogant.
- dllthomas 7y agoThere were always objections. "Unix went from being the worst operating system available, to being the best operating system available, without getting appreciably better." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19416485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19416485 Which isn't to say that those POV were necessarily correct, just that it isn't all hindsight.
- the_af 7y agoTo be fair, there are always objections to any working piece of technology. It's not helpful to claim "it was never good design". It was a working design that drove technology to the point it is now, and in that sense it was hugely successful. What kind of perfect and pure tech do some people want, anyway? Pick anything, whatever they like -- say, Plan 9 or OS/2 or whatever -- and I can bet you in a parallel universe where that tech won, someone on para-HN will claim that it sucked and it was never a good design and if only Unix had won.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dllthomas 7y agoI certainly don't disagree that it was successful, and (coming into technology when I did) I've always personally liked it. I just found the writings around what came before interesting. > I can bet you in a parallel universe where that tech won, someone on para-HN will claim that it sucked and it was never a good design and if only Unix had won. I'd take the same side of that bet as you :-P