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Except the way it's presented by Aho is farcical. Smalltalk is small and beautiful. Forth is small and beautiful. Scheme is small and beautiful. C is NOT small
by armitron 7y ago
Except the way it's presented by Aho is farcical. Smalltalk is small and beautiful. Forth is small and beautiful. Scheme is small and beautiful. C is NOT small and beautiful. Unix is NOT small and beautiful.
Aho is going off the cliff here. To me this looks more like a no holds-barred whitewashing than a eulogy. Richard Gabriel (to say nothing of the MIT crowd) was absolutely right, and it's painful to see him so easily dismissed. We should lament C and Unix being so prevalent today, not wear them like a badge of honor.
- abvr 7y agoWait, saying both C and UNIX aren't small and beautiful seems like one major oxymoron. Care to elaborate on those? IIUC, both of them were created in a small and concise design to perform tasks that most systems of the time failed to hold up to. In fact, the very reason they've endured such long time spans must be enough proof of their beautiful concise yet efficient design. Take any language or operating system today, they just cannot design them without some inspiration or functionality derived from C or UNIX. Complexity today is insane, take Linux for example, but the darn thing works! The original UNIX was the exact opposite of today's major operating systems in a way, which was designed to perform tasks based on the UNIX philosophy. Linux or any other OS today take complexity to levels the creators of UNIX never foresaw and is one of those aspects they wish today wasn't done. But the world itself has changed since the 70s, and so has Linux too, evolved into having thousands of system calls, whereas the original UNIX had 20.