The other times this appeared on HN are informative. But to be the devils advocate here, the unix abstraction is only beautiful if your living in a single proc

The other times this appeared on HN are informative. But to be the devils advocate here, the unix abstraction is only beautiful if your living in a single process, single user, teletype environment. Add multiple users, network programming, multiple processes/threads, async IO, etc, etc, etc. and the whole thing starts to look like the layered monstrosity full of edge states, and broken promises the author is arguing against. Although frankly, there aren't many better choices. NT being nearly 3 decades newer and with the forethought of VMS is actually much better at a systems programming level but you have to be willing to dedicate significantly more effort upfront to understand the more complex task/io/user/permissions model. In the end there is probably less of a learning curve on windows, but its steeper because you end up having to learn how to do all this stuff on the various *nix clones as well, just using bolt on interfaces that frequently vary slightly between the different flavors. In a way this applies to much of the windows ecosystem now that vb6/delphi aren't popular and the similar attempts at web co-design utilities have largely died.