3 ms·
I remember back in the day, overly Unix people had a mantra, a filesystem is not a database which is kind of a non-sentence like a Macintosh is not a typewriter
by CalChris 5y ago
I remember back in the day, overly Unix people had a mantra, a filesystem is not a database which is kind of a non-sentence like a Macintosh is not a typewriter, also common at the time.
The dominant storage technology then, disks, had structure and performance was determined largely by that structure. Ignoring that structure did not solve the performance problem. I thought that maybe a filesystem actually needed a schema and wrote a semester paper for that for CS262.
Well that went over like a lead balloon. It's less necessary now with SSDs, but I often think that Unix/Linux oversimplifies and then pays technical debt for decades for having adopted a simpler approach than VMS/...
- GauntletWizard 5y agoAnd the success of VMS in the modern era speaks to that.
- Aloha 5y agoSome of the structures of Files-11 lives on in NTFS in part. Some of the structure of VMS lives on in NT.
- pjmlp 5y agoIt is just another example of all the things UNIX people decided to ignore, yet thanks to Worse is Better, now it is everywhere with plenty of technical debt to fix.
- lproven 5y agoWhenever I read a HN comment and recoil because it's something that I could well have written myself, inevitably, it was @pjmlp. :-D
- SigmundA 5y agoSeems obvious to me that a file system is a type of hierarchal k/v database.