7 ms·

I mean the empirical evidence alone seems point at the Unix Philosophy not actually being popular in practice. GNU tools are much more widely used on boxes huma

by xxpor 5y ago

I mean the empirical evidence alone seems point at the Unix Philosophy not actually being popular in practice. GNU tools are much more widely used on boxes humans interact with than BSD/busybox. You don't see everyone trying to figure out how to install all of the suckless tools immediately after installing linux, etc. And then of course we get into systemd and that whole ball of wax. I do think there's a growing split between server like things and desktop like systems that people actually regularly use. For example, Alpine is super popular in containers, not so much on desktops. Same thing with Busybox, but that's more explicitly meant for embedded envs.

wyager 5y ago
Software popularity is almost always a historical accident rather than a reflection of users' preferences.
- ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
  Almost nobody used the original Unix-tools on any Unix (like Irix, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX and Tru64). Everybody installed the GNU tools, that's why after some time every vendor shipped them with their Unix as add-on disks.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Not really, because devs would have to put up with what the likes of people like myself actually made available on the servers they had to telnet into for development. The only big UNIX where I actually did install GNU stuff was on Solaris 2.6 via the GNU packages repository, because I was requested to do so. All our HP-UX and Aix boxes used the vendor tooling (including the C compilers).
    - ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
      > Not really, because devs would have to put up with what the likes of people like myself actually made available on the servers they had to telnet into for development. Fortunately that didn't work when you needed 3D graphics hardware. But I guess you worked in a 'server' company, not a graphics (3D or engineering) one? > All our HP-UX and Aix boxes used the vendor tooling (including the C compilers). Of course, GCC was only needed for most of the later (early 2000s) OSS like Mozilla that didn't work with the native compilers because of missing GNU extensions. That's one thing I don't miss - the prices of compilers. SGI took more than 10,000 € for their MipsPro C, C++ and Fortran compilers but without 'advanced' optimization options like auto parallelization and their 'IDE' tools, Developer Workshop. That reminded my of Totalview (a debugger from ???): now Perforce bought them https://totalview.io/ https://totalview.io/
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        Of course it did, ever heard of OpenGL and X Windows on AIX or SGI Or SGI Onyx, for another example. In fact the whole cloud streaming hype is basically a bunch of people rediscovering graphics programming with timesharing on UNIX.
        ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
        Sorry, I badly phrased that. I was talking about a company that used Unix on their servers, instead of workstations (usually for 3D Work). Although many used Indys and later O2s and Octanes as terminals for their Crimson or Onyx (2) (but not via telnet). That's what _I_ did and in these environments (usually Irix, some Solaris, AIX and HP-UX) the GNU tools were usually installed (except on single purpose computers that only ran one program, like F/F/I, Softimage or Maya or some 3D CAD). Maybe in the big automotive companies (using 3D CAD/CAM) the admins were, well 'enterprisey', but normally you were root on your workstation as developer.
        pjmlp 5y ago
        Sure, I didn't want to make it there was only one way to do it, I just happened to be more used to such enterprise style configurations. Actually one way to mix both, while controlling what people were allowed to do on their workstations was to boot via tftp and have $HOME mapped noexec over NFS. A solution used in some labs at the university campus.
- xxpor 5y ago
  Kind of hard to separate cause and effect there. Why does my dad prefer Windows? He's used it for 30 years and he's used to it. If he switched to Ubuntu, would he prefer that? Perhaps, but there's a lot of stuff to learn. So he prefers Windows, in some sense.
  - traviscj 5y ago
    I have the same problem with textmate :-(
  - johnisgood 5y ago
    I think for a large number of people it would make no difference as they are in the browser at all times, or the software they use on the daily is available for Linux, too.
throw10920 5y ago
> I mean the empirical evidence alone seems point at the Unix Philosophy not actually being popular in practice. GNU tools are much more widely used on boxes humans interact with than BSD/busybox. I think that I can present an even better piece of empirical evidence (not to diminish the poignancy of your own): Almost no large or successful piece of software is composed of Unix command-line utilities. Firefox, Linux, gcc, Visual Studio Code, Windows, Chrome, Google services, Discord, Spotify, Blender, GIMP, Apache, Slack, Office, Steam, Matrix/Element...almost every single non-trivial piece of software in existence is not composed out of Unix shell utility pipelines. "Do one thing well" allows you to do one thing well, tautologically - but it doesn't allow you to do many things well. The fact that Unix utilities compose at a very superficial level is irrelevant, because the use of text as an interchange format is such a heart-stoppingly bad idea (consider a programming language where the only type is a string - you wanna write a web server in that?) that it renders Unix tools near-useless for building larger tools (as evidenced by the fact that nothing is made with them), and only useful for immediate interactive use, and building small scripts with (that would already be better served by a real programming language). The Unix Philosophy is self-contradictory. "Do one thing well" is meant to enable composition, for building larger programs - but "Text is the universal interface" is in direct opposition to building larger programs. But, because tools are only supposed to do one thing well, they're feature-impoverished and not very useful on their own, so you have to compose them. You're screwed either way.
- jmfldn 5y ago
  Shell programming through small cli tools was never meant to scale into massive complex software so you're comparing apples and bananas. Do one thing well and text as the universal interface works well in the small for parsing files, doing sys admin tasks, gluing a few things together. That's what it's intended for. It's obviously the wrong tool to build a system in. Used in the right context they compose beautifully.
- rustyminnow 5y ago
  Different tools serve different purposes. Just because you wouldn't write a web browser/server/IDE/OS in a shell scripting language doesn't mean they don't have value or are failed paradigms. I've written tons of shell scripts for one-off jobs or simple work that would've taken 2, 3, maybe 4 times the amount the time to write in a "real" programming language. (E.g. throwaway code to generate 10,000 test files that are slightly different would take me 5-10 minutes in bash, but maybe half an hour in node or python.) Passing around strings isn't the BEST paradigm but it's extremely flexible when you need flexibility. There are times when you need something more solid and that's fine too. And fwiw I'd bet a majority of the software you listed uses bash somewhere in either their build process or SAAS stack.
bch 5y ago
> GNU tools are much more widely used on boxes humans interact with than BSD/busybox. You don't see everyone trying to figure out how to install all of the suckless tools immediately after installing linux, etc. Or perhaps those BSDers, suckless tool users, etc get setup and quietly just get to work. I feel that’s plausible. I think you’re right re: server/desktop split, which decades ago might have been hard to tell apart. Is desktop-computing and some loud but ignorant (of Unix) majority directing the future of Unix down the garden path or are the traditionalists out of touch and just yelling at clouds and kids to stay off their lawn? I fall into the traditionalist camp - I think the Unix that got us here is Good and to know it is to love it. I think pushing back against complexity is (and has been for a long time) an additional challenge for BSD/Linux, besides it’s primary role of being a great compute environment. The BSDs have done marvellously here. > I mean the empirical evidence alone seems point at the Unix Philosophy not actually being popular in practice. I’m worried this is polling 100 people off the street about how they care for their kitchen knives and trying to tie that back to Michelin Star restaurant kitchens. I don’t know…

by xxpor 5y ago

wyager 5y ago

Software popularity is almost always a historical accident rather than a reflection of users' preferences.

ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
Almost nobody used the original Unix-tools on any Unix (like Irix, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX and Tru64). Everybody installed the GNU tools, that's why after some time every vendor shipped them with their Unix as add-on disks.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Not really, because devs would have to put up with what the likes of people like myself actually made available on the servers they had to telnet into for development. The only big UNIX where I actually did install GNU stuff was on Solaris 2.6 via the GNU packages repository, because I was requested to do so. All our HP-UX and Aix boxes used the vendor tooling (including the C compilers).
  - ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
    > Not really, because devs would have to put up with what the likes of people like myself actually made available on the servers they had to telnet into for development. Fortunately that didn't work when you needed 3D graphics hardware. But I guess you worked in a 'server' company, not a graphics (3D or engineering) one? > All our HP-UX and Aix boxes used the vendor tooling (including the C compilers). Of course, GCC was only needed for most of the later (early 2000s) OSS like Mozilla that didn't work with the native compilers because of missing GNU extensions. That's one thing I don't miss - the prices of compilers. SGI took more than 10,000 € for their MipsPro C, C++ and Fortran compilers but without 'advanced' optimization options like auto parallelization and their 'IDE' tools, Developer Workshop. That reminded my of Totalview (a debugger from ???): now Perforce bought them https://totalview.io/ https://totalview.io/
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Of course it did, ever heard of OpenGL and X Windows on AIX or SGI Or SGI Onyx, for another example. In fact the whole cloud streaming hype is basically a bunch of people rediscovering graphics programming with timesharing on UNIX.
      - ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
        Sorry, I badly phrased that. I was talking about a company that used Unix on their servers, instead of workstations (usually for 3D Work). Although many used Indys and later O2s and Octanes as terminals for their Crimson or Onyx (2) (but not via telnet). That's what _I_ did and in these environments (usually Irix, some Solaris, AIX and HP-UX) the GNU tools were usually installed (except on single purpose computers that only ran one program, like F/F/I, Softimage or Maya or some 3D CAD). Maybe in the big automotive companies (using 3D CAD/CAM) the admins were, well 'enterprisey', but normally you were root on your workstation as developer.
        pjmlp 5y ago
        Sure, I didn't want to make it there was only one way to do it, I just happened to be more used to such enterprise style configurations. Actually one way to mix both, while controlling what people were allowed to do on their workstations was to boot via tftp and have $HOME mapped noexec over NFS. A solution used in some labs at the university campus.
xxpor 5y ago
Kind of hard to separate cause and effect there. Why does my dad prefer Windows? He's used it for 30 years and he's used to it. If he switched to Ubuntu, would he prefer that? Perhaps, but there's a lot of stuff to learn. So he prefers Windows, in some sense.
- traviscj 5y ago
  I have the same problem with textmate :-(
- johnisgood 5y ago
  I think for a large number of people it would make no difference as they are in the browser at all times, or the software they use on the daily is available for Linux, too.

throw10920 5y ago

> I mean the empirical evidence alone seems point at the Unix Philosophy not actually being popular in practice. GNU tools are much more widely used on boxes humans interact with than BSD/busybox. I think that I can present an even better piece of empirical evidence (not to diminish the poignancy of your own): Almost no large or successful piece of software is composed of Unix command-line utilities. Firefox, Linux, gcc, Visual Studio Code, Windows, Chrome, Google services, Discord, Spotify, Blender, GIMP, Apache, Slack, Office, Steam, Matrix/Element...almost every single non-trivial piece of software in existence is not composed out of Unix shell utility pipelines. "Do one thing well" allows you to do one thing well, tautologically - but it doesn't allow you to do many things well. The fact that Unix utilities compose at a very superficial level is irrelevant, because the use of text as an interchange format is such a heart-stoppingly bad idea (consider a programming language where the only type is a string - you wanna write a web server in that?) that it renders Unix tools near-useless for building larger tools (as evidenced by the fact that nothing is made with them), and only useful for immediate interactive use, and building small scripts with (that would already be better served by a real programming language). The Unix Philosophy is self-contradictory. "Do one thing well" is meant to enable composition, for building larger programs - but "Text is the universal interface" is in direct opposition to building larger programs. But, because tools are only supposed to do one thing well, they're feature-impoverished and not very useful on their own, so you have to compose them. You're screwed either way.

jmfldn 5y ago
Shell programming through small cli tools was never meant to scale into massive complex software so you're comparing apples and bananas. Do one thing well and text as the universal interface works well in the small for parsing files, doing sys admin tasks, gluing a few things together. That's what it's intended for. It's obviously the wrong tool to build a system in. Used in the right context they compose beautifully.
rustyminnow 5y ago
Different tools serve different purposes. Just because you wouldn't write a web browser/server/IDE/OS in a shell scripting language doesn't mean they don't have value or are failed paradigms. I've written tons of shell scripts for one-off jobs or simple work that would've taken 2, 3, maybe 4 times the amount the time to write in a "real" programming language. (E.g. throwaway code to generate 10,000 test files that are slightly different would take me 5-10 minutes in bash, but maybe half an hour in node or python.) Passing around strings isn't the BEST paradigm but it's extremely flexible when you need flexibility. There are times when you need something more solid and that's fine too. And fwiw I'd bet a majority of the software you listed uses bash somewhere in either their build process or SAAS stack.

bch 5y ago

> GNU tools are much more widely used on boxes humans interact with than BSD/busybox. You don't see everyone trying to figure out how to install all of the suckless tools immediately after installing linux, etc. Or perhaps those BSDers, suckless tool users, etc get setup and quietly just get to work. I feel that’s plausible. I think you’re right re: server/desktop split, which decades ago might have been hard to tell apart. Is desktop-computing and some loud but ignorant (of Unix) majority directing the future of Unix down the garden path or are the traditionalists out of touch and just yelling at clouds and kids to stay off their lawn? I fall into the traditionalist camp - I think the Unix that got us here is Good and to know it is to love it. I think pushing back against complexity is (and has been for a long time) an additional challenge for BSD/Linux, besides it’s primary role of being a great compute environment. The BSDs have done marvellously here. > I mean the empirical evidence alone seems point at the Unix Philosophy not actually being popular in practice. I’m worried this is polling 100 people off the street about how they care for their kitchen knives and trying to tie that back to Michelin Star restaurant kitchens. I don’t know…