10 ms·

I've been tempted to write rants like this before. Ryan's point seems particularly centered around Unix, which makes sense. My experience of trying to get stuff

• clark-kent 15y ago
  Unix is very easy if you take time to learn it. Most things behave the same way.
  • knieveltech 15y ago
    Demonstrably untrue based on two and a half decades of experience. At least chasing lib dependencies for 18 hours during the config/make/make install process is mostly a thing of the past.
    • ez77 15y ago
      Do you have any broad advice on easing the config/make/make install process?
      • thmcmahon 15y ago
        apt-get install
        • sagarun 15y ago
          or yum install, Where yum automatically resolves the dependencies for you. No more make && make install
          • metabrew 15y ago
            Nothing to do.
  • Leon 15y ago
    You just proved the authors point.
  • sbierwagen 15y ago
    Most things behave the same way. Ha ha. You jest. bbot@bbot:~/foo$ ls bar bbot@bbot:~/foo$ ls bar text.txt bbot@bbot:~/foo$ mv bar baz bbot@bbot:~/foo$ ls baz bbot@bbot:~/foo$ cp baz bar cp: omitting directory `baz' bbot@bbot:~/foo$ ls baz There are hundreds of things like this. dd's hilarious syntax. The spotty usage of --help. Inconsistent behavior when you invoke a command with no arguments. The dazzling array of contradictory option flags for ls. Everything about vi. Etc etc etc.
    • silentbicycle 15y ago
      He said "Unix", not "Linux".
      • regularfry 15y ago
        I'm confused. Which of these don't apply?
• vacri 15y ago
  And yet...we put up with it. Because there isn't a better option. vs this is needless (from the article) doesn't really gel. If it's actually needless, then you know a better way of doing it - so publish it! The problem with Unix is that it doesn't have a concept of a user. Nope. It doesn't have a concept of a naive user. Table saws also don't have a concept of a naive user, but people don't bitch about folks trying to use a table saw without having to learn how first.
  • divtxt 15y ago
    Challenge accepted! - Here's how needless Unix users is: Every fresh server install, I have to make up a meaningless string called the 'login' of an 'admin user' who belongs to a 'group' called 'admin'. Once upon a time, I could use the well known admin login 'root'. Now that's not allowed. I have to make up a name, remember this name when you connect and then remember to prefix every command with sudo. - Here's a better way of doing it: Give me a server distro where I don't need a 'login'. Meanwhile, why is apache pretending to be a 'user' called 'nobody'/'http' and not using some 'capabilities' or some shit like that?!!!!
    • StavrosK 15y ago
      Nobody forces you to use a login, you can use the root account with a blank password on your server if you like, it will do exactly what you want...
      • adestefan 15y ago
        You don't even have to do that. You can replace init with whatever you want and you'll never see a login prompt.
    • dspillett 15y ago
      > Every fresh server install, I have to make up a meaningless string called the 'login' If you are only doing the occasional install then this really shouldn't be a great hardship. If you are installing many servers you should have this part automated. And ti shouldn't be meaningless either. I think you are doing it wrong. > Once upon a time, I could use the well known admin login 'root'. You still can. root login can always be reenabled if you want it that badly. There is also "sudo su" (unless explicitly disabled by your admins) to avoid repeated invocations of sudo while you are performing a long admin task. > - Here's a better way of doing it: > Give me a server distro where I don't need a 'login'. No, no, and thrice no. Far too many newbies will leave it in that state and get hacked to buggery in short order. Even if it is only for local console logins, I'd consider it a bad idea. No matter how inconvenient it is, server install should default to an insecure state and allowing access without authentication is such a state. Live CDs often do this, but they are not production systems. > Meanwhile, why is apache pretending to be a 'user' Well that much is a valid point. There has been work in this area but non of it has made its way to default setups of most unix-a-like systems.
• robomc 15y ago
  He mentions things in that rant that I have no idea about, but I can get plenty of stuff done on Debian (as an example) - coding command line apps, creating services, deploying webapps... I mean, it sounds like he's doing some pretty fiddly stuff - really getting in there and hacking. I don't see how that could ever be simple, and it certainly isn't anything 'end user' facing. End users check their email online and work in spreadsheets occasionally. They don't develop server-side js frameworks. I guess the argument is that if things were simpler, then maybe they could do those things? But I don't buy it. (I get the frustration, when you're held up for 45 minutes googling because some library is missing or a string isn't formatted just so, but that sort of thing only happens when you're literally hacking things up. Which isn't end user behavior, and I can't see how it could ever be a whole lot simpler. Maybe I'm just short sighted.
  • ansgri 15y ago
    End users NOT only "check their email online and work in spreadsheets occasionally". They use complicated workflow systems, data analysis environments, resource-hungry media editing applications, and very complex yet almost undocumented scientific instruments. And the mountain of domain knowledge they have is no less than that of Unix systems programmer, so they just don't have place for the latter.
  • khafra 15y ago
    Here's an example: I use Snort, and wanted to set up Snorby because BASE is ancient and creaky and doesn't work well. It's written in Ruby, so it should be easy, right? Just get a package with the correct version of Ruby, then gem install until I have the prerequisites. Nope. I gave up trying to install it months ago, but it required many external programs at versions too recent to be included in distro repositories, and which as far as I could tell were mutually incompatible. Obviously, people have gotten it to work, because it's a pretty popular front-end, but I never did.
  • andypants 15y ago
    I don't think you understood the post correctly. Your comment is the same point that he is making, that end users never see any of the stuff he needs to fiddle around with while developing. Why does the developer need to learn all of that stuff when it makes no difference to the end user? He's saying that the development side could be simplified as long as the end result (what the user sees) stays the same, since the user doesn't care how the product was developed. The dev side is horrendously complicated, which is why he says he hates almost all software.
• danenania 15y ago
  Thus Heroku.
  • robomc 15y ago
    Exactly, and Heroku isn't simple. It's just simple for you, because it places you in an actual end user role. (Which you pay for). Heroku is no doubt complicated as hell for the people who developed it. So if the argument is that developing node.js should have been like deploying to a paid managed hosting environment with fairly tight requirements, then ok. But that's a weird thing to assert.
    • danenania 15y ago
      Isn't the entire point of the op about making software simple for the end user? Obviously Heroku is complex underneath, but they've created a beautiful abstraction that makes an extremely complicated stack very simple to interact with. It doesn't solve every system administration problem in the world, but they're doing their part to make software more pleasant to work with.
      • robomc 15y ago
        Yeah see what you're saying. I guess my angle is that the original Heroku (before they had cash and time to add more support) had a tight limited costly scope - it concealed the complexity of deploying a rack app, and charged $50-100 a month for that concealment. And I'd say that if all you want to do is deploy a rack app, you can do that relatively simply in Debian too, for free. (I'd do it with rvm and perhaps build nginx from source and such, but you could do 90% of it straight from apt-get, rubygems and editing ~three config files). The sorts of things that are really tricky, and have you sweating over the sorts of things the original post is complaining about, are just hard original work (and free, and you don't have to wait years for them to support your pet language or framework or whatever). It's an acceptable trade-off, an issue internal to the concerns of developers - not end users, and not a reason to hate on unix, is all I'm saying. Not at all hating on the service Heroku provides.
    • Hisoka 15y ago
• tintin 15y ago
  "Because it's our job." Well probably not. I don't spend hours on fixing my own car. I leave that job to the ones who know about cars. Install a new server: ask someone who knows, give him your specs and he will set up the rig. That's the funny thing about internet. Everybody can get the knowledge he needs, but that doesn't mean you can apply that knowledge and know about all consequences.
  • ianterrell 15y ago
    Long live the PaaS mechanics!
    • andypants 15y ago
      Car-Mechanic-as-a-Service. Have your car fixed, pay by the hour, brilliant idea!
  • projectileboy 15y ago
    Exactly. As a friend of mine once said, "being in shape and being able to get into shape aren't the same thing".
• iand 15y ago
  Have you looked at http://www.turnkeylinux.org/ http://www.turnkeylinux.org/
• divtxt 15y ago
  On a practical note, I've seen the install situation improve in the last 5 years thanks to two ubuntu features: - the ease of apt-get install (inherited from debian) - ubuntu LTS releases I now use availability of apt-get instructions for an LTS as one of the measures of the maturity of a software package.
  • lamby 15y ago
    So.. things that have been in Debian for years.
    • divtxt 15y ago
      NO - this is about the availability of DOCS to setup 3rd party software. 10 years ago, Debian may have had apt-get and stable but a lot of software setup docs were for building from source leading to possible compile issues and version conflicts for libraries. Now, many setup docs are written as apt-get of binary packages for the last Ubuntu LTS.
• deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
  • deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  • jules 15y ago
    This feeling that an appropriate amount of punishment must be exchanged for everything of value that you get back from your computer is the attitude that leads to unusable software that is configured to be insecure by default.
• crag 15y ago
  And now you know why I use a Mac. :) Unix is there, if I want it and thank the gods there are package managers.
  • doron 15y ago
    Imagine the amount of hacks and abstractions that go into making a GUI work on top of UNIX. the complication is compounded, it is easier for the end user (for some tasks not all) but the complexity he is talking about isn't solved by fancy widgets. It depends what kind of user you are. Few user require fussing around with D-Bus etc..
• dotty 15y ago
  It's not really because you don't care, etc, it's just because you're not good enough. Some people are knowledgeable, others are doomed to be Ruby programmers forever, but that's life.
• flip_man 15y ago
  Free Your Technical Aesthetic from the 1970s: http://prog21.dadgum.com/74.html http://prog21.dadgum.com/74.html
• gambler 15y ago
  Unix is just an example. Doing something non-trivial in Windows is usually even more complicated and involves a good amount of black magic. The post is about how tool complexity vastly exceeds complexity of the problems those tools solve. Because we'd rather just bull through and get things done than spend an infinite amount of time fixing something that isn't fixable. This is a lie. Most developers don't even try to make things simple, and then say it's an unfixable issues to give themselves an excuse. I see this happen pretty much every day. Yes, simple is hard. Yes, designing simple systems requires doing more work, and sometimes re-doing your old work, but it does not require "infinite amount of time". It's perfectly doable, and there is return on investment in the long run, unless you're solving fake problems in the first place.
• tedjdziuba 15y ago
  You don't know the tools, and don't want to take the time to learn them, and yet you have a difficult time using them Shocking.