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For the record, this guy is either going for the long troll writing these sorts of absurd nostalgic pieces, or is really this enamored with the classicist "pure

by notsure 15y ago

For the record, this guy is either going for the long troll writing these sorts of absurd nostalgic pieces, or is really this enamored with the classicist "pure" world of computing of the 70s that he's still stuck in. He's been writing these sorts of patronizing, wringing-of-hands pieces for years that honestly belong more in comp.lang.lisp more than anywhere else. Always yearning for the good ol days and talking about how we're in some sort of technological Dark Ages is his thing. Shame he's such a verbose critic of everything new to come across his way instead of someone who actually builds or does something.

jeffdavis 15y ago
Agreed. However, there is some kind of a point here, which is that applications shouldn't be forced to deal with all kinds of error-prone methods. For instance, I think that filesystems are more low-level than most applications should have to deal with, and the hierarchical structure more often represents some arbitrary imposition than a useful organizational technique. It's 2011, and linux still doesn't offer a stable filesystem with snapshotting/versioning, CRCs, atomic operations, etc. Soon btrfs may be here, but it will be years before it's widespread enough for application developers to count on it, and the basic posix APIs won't make it easy to actually make use of these things.
- lloeki 15y ago
  I bet ZFS would already be there if not for license compatibility issues.
  - jeffdavis 15y ago
    That doesn't change the situation. Right now, writing applications is harder to get right, because the basic storage mechanism is a filesystem that forces a hierarchy upon you and provides only the most rudimentary safety guarantees (no ACID, no snapshots, etc.). It happens that Solaris, FreeBSD, OSX, and windows (yes, windows) have taken a good, strong step forward to address this issue. Unfortunately, linux is behind. I say that mainly to show priorities -- one would think that any feature that fundamentally makes applications easier to write would be the top priority of an OS.

by notsure 15y ago

jeffdavis 15y ago

Agreed. However, there is some kind of a point here, which is that applications shouldn't be forced to deal with all kinds of error-prone methods. For instance, I think that filesystems are more low-level than most applications should have to deal with, and the hierarchical structure more often represents some arbitrary imposition than a useful organizational technique. It's 2011, and linux still doesn't offer a stable filesystem with snapshotting/versioning, CRCs, atomic operations, etc. Soon btrfs may be here, but it will be years before it's widespread enough for application developers to count on it, and the basic posix APIs won't make it easy to actually make use of these things.

lloeki 15y ago
I bet ZFS would already be there if not for license compatibility issues.
- jeffdavis 15y ago
  That doesn't change the situation. Right now, writing applications is harder to get right, because the basic storage mechanism is a filesystem that forces a hierarchy upon you and provides only the most rudimentary safety guarantees (no ACID, no snapshots, etc.). It happens that Solaris, FreeBSD, OSX, and windows (yes, windows) have taken a good, strong step forward to address this issue. Unfortunately, linux is behind. I say that mainly to show priorities -- one would think that any feature that fundamentally makes applications easier to write would be the top priority of an OS.