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The title itself lets you know the desire of the author to occupy some philosophical high ground, while admitting some hard truths. They could have asked more
by Isamu 7y ago
The title itself lets you know the desire of the author to occupy some philosophical high ground, while admitting some hard truths.
They could have asked more honestly, "why is C/Unix winning hearts and minds while Lisp-based systems are not" but first they wanted to provide the given that C/Unix was clearly inferior to Lisp based systems. That was not up for debate.
So that sets the bounds for the discussion that follows, and frames the discussion as "why are people choosing the clearly inferior over the clearly superior?"
You could write a similar essay from the point of view of what you might call the "original intent" of C/Unix, which is that simplicity is chronically undervalued and everybody, everywhere, all the time, try to add "just one more feature" to make it better.
- jonjacky 7y agoThat essay has already been written, Rob Pike's UNIX Style, or cat -v Considered Harmful [1]. It inspired a web site and project devoted to simplifying Unix [2]. [1] http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/ http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/ [2] http://cat-v.org/ http://cat-v.org/