5 ms·

Would you care to elaborate why Unix, in your opinion, was never a good design?

by pzs 7y ago

pjmlp 7y ago
It was re-written on an unsafe language that completely disregarded what has happened outside Bell Labs since 1961, at Burroughs, IBM, MIT, Xerox and other research cathedrals. It only took off thanks to Bell Labs being forbidden to sell it, so it got offered for a symbolic price, alongside source code to major universities, which then decided to build on top, instead of paying OS street prices. Had UNIX been sold in the same vein as other mainframe OSes and no one would be talking about whatever quality it might have had.
- systemBuilder 7y ago
  I worked on the xerox product OS (Pilot) written by my manager, and was on the team with the designers of Multics and Swift, MIT's OSes. At MIT we all ran 4.15bsd and then 4.2bsd and UNIX was so far ahead we focused on improving it, mostly. Pilot, Multics, CTSS, were nowhere near as powerful or developer friendly as UNIX. UNIX killed off OS research for a long time!
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Given what I know from XDE and Cedar, I fail to see how a text based CLI, without the graphical debuggers, REPL and GUI workflows was more developer friendly.
- Ericson2314 7y ago
  Thank you for being a breadth of wisdom in the UNIX-worshiping wilderness. You can always get mindshare being first massively underpriced thing to market.
  - jstimpfle 7y ago
    Only that this doesn't even touch on design, or what parts could have been done better.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      Sure it does, not using C to start with. Or in another form, C should have done the same as other systems languages, do proper bounds checking, arrays and strings without implicit decay into pointers. Second, having a proper UI story like NeXTSTEP or NeWS, and not the X11 Frankenstein.
      - jstimpfle 7y ago
        Equating kernel design with choice of implementation is a stretch. Also, Unix is not X11, and weren't the other ones running on top of Unices as well?
        mypalmike 7y ago
        Just walk away. "The language runtime is the OS." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15468395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15468395

Would you care to elaborate why Unix, in your opinion, was never a good design?

by pzs 7y ago

Would you care to elaborate why Unix, in your opinion, was never a good design?

It was re-written on an unsafe language that completely disregarded what has happened outside Bell Labs since 1961, at Burroughs, IBM, MIT, Xerox and other research cathedrals. It only took off thanks to Bell Labs being forbidden to sell it, so it got offered for a symbolic price, alongside source code to major universities, which then decided to build on top, instead of paying OS street prices. Had UNIX been sold in the same vein as other mainframe OSes and no one would be talking about whatever quality it might have had.

systemBuilder 7y ago
I worked on the xerox product OS (Pilot) written by my manager, and was on the team with the designers of Multics and Swift, MIT's OSes. At MIT we all ran 4.15bsd and then 4.2bsd and UNIX was so far ahead we focused on improving it, mostly. Pilot, Multics, CTSS, were nowhere near as powerful or developer friendly as UNIX. UNIX killed off OS research for a long time!
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Given what I know from XDE and Cedar, I fail to see how a text based CLI, without the graphical debuggers, REPL and GUI workflows was more developer friendly.
Ericson2314 7y ago
Thank you for being a breadth of wisdom in the UNIX-worshiping wilderness. You can always get mindshare being first massively underpriced thing to market.
- jstimpfle 7y ago
  Only that this doesn't even touch on design, or what parts could have been done better.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Sure it does, not using C to start with. Or in another form, C should have done the same as other systems languages, do proper bounds checking, arrays and strings without implicit decay into pointers. Second, having a proper UI story like NeXTSTEP or NeWS, and not the X11 Frankenstein.
    - jstimpfle 7y ago
      Equating kernel design with choice of implementation is a stretch. Also, Unix is not X11, and weren't the other ones running on top of Unices as well?
      - mypalmike 7y ago
        Just walk away. "The language runtime is the OS." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15468395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15468395