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Unix philosophy has plenty of problems: https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

• anthk 5y ago
  That book as trully outdated. By ~1999-2000 most BSD's and GNU/Linux since 1996 solved all the issues with better shells, faster tools and toolkits like Motif (and later QT), and multimedia thanks to SDL, DRI and FFMPEG. It's like noticing Windows 9x's lack of security and stability on Windows 10 times. Absurd. Heck, that book praised Mac OS back in the day, and just look what Mac OS has been turned into since Mac OS X. Also, thanks to Unix philosphy my Fluxbox+Rox+Roxlib combo based "DE" it's much faster and featureful than most light desktops out there.
  • azinman2 5y ago
    Of course it's outdated. But many of the complaints are still just as true. Two letter command line options, the expansion of * in place particularly if there's a file with that name, the role of the shell versus the app in parsing arguments, coredumps on crashes versus interactive debuggers, losing many of the great things that Symbolics computers did that still most computers don't, the preference of simplicity over correctness, the way file versioning works (it doesn't exist)... it's full of great timeless analysis. I'm only partially way through it myself and its easy to find things that are not or cannot be solved without massively changing the OS. It goes into great depth about the philosophical problems regardless of time.
    • anthk 5y ago
      > Two letter command line options That's a con against RSI.