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> Those who don't understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. What a low value and needlessly dismissive comment. And based on HN's track record it p
by underwater 6y ago
> Those who don't understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
What a low value and needlessly dismissive comment. And based on HN's track record it probably means Arcan actually has a shot.
- Koshkin 6y agoAgreed. (MS-DOS may have “reinvented UNIX, poorly,” but there do exist other OS and other approaches to UI that enjoy a large and happy user base.)
- bjornjajayaja 6y agoHonestly one could argue that DOS has some merit beyond Unix. It’s simple command line interface expects users will program in other languages like C or assembly. It’s more directly interaction with the machine. Sure it had limitations like file name lengths etc back in the day, but I think many Unix shells are overly complex and ought to yield to more suitable languages like Perl.
- hashkb 6y agoMany of the standard unix tools are not written in sh. They're written in C. Am I missing something in your comment?
- ticviking 6y ago> It’s simple command line interface expects users will program in other languages like C or assembly. I think the point here is that DOS explicitly rejects the composition that pipes enable, in exchange for the ability to just hand "the whole system" over to a programmer.
- mixmastamyk 6y agoDOS had pipes since version 2.0 I believe. But the main point, that DOS was basically a thin program loader that "got out of the way" is sound. Think of it like a UEFI shell environment, with 640k+ limits.
- unilynx 6y agoDos pipes were just writes and reads to temporary files. No parallel processes
- mixmastamyk 6y agoOk, but didn't concern the end user, as far as I can remember.
- mixmastamyk 6y agoAgreed in general, however shell languages (should) have a different focus, such as running processes. There's been a few attempts at this, but I settled on the fish shell as it has a good balance and syntax highlighting for interactivity. I still write simple scripts in sh and complex ones in Python however.
- donatj 6y agoIt’s a pretty common quote from Introducing Regular Expressions (2012) by Michael Fitzgerald, used as a quip.
- oblio 6y agoHe he, recency bias, I guess? It's from The Art of Unix Programming (2003) by Eric S. Raymond. It's actually in the first chapter. And the supposedly original quote is: > Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. > -- Henry Spencer Usenet signature, November 1987 http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/philosophychapter.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/philosophychapt... Henry Spencer being: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Spencer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Spencer . I imagine that's why the quote is also in that regexp book. It's a super arrogant quote used, I'd say, 95% of the time by people who don't deeply know other OSes (besides shallow memes and jokes about them).
- cb321 6y agoThe general structure of the quip/aphorism/joke/snark pre-dates the industrial revolution dating back (at least!) to Edmund Burke's [1] "Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke
- oblio 6y agoYeah, I know, but the difference is that Burke was actually right :-D
- mixmastamyk 6y agoSounds similar to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santayana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santayana Looks like Burke lived a century+ earlier.
- Koshkin 6y agoEven less recently, we have had a very similar sounding Greenspun’s Tenth Rule.