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This article just keeps repeating the two concepts of Unix technology and Unix ideas but doesn't clarify what they mean by either. The links, seemingly complain
by bmitc 3y ago
This article just keeps repeating the two concepts of Unix technology and Unix ideas but doesn't clarify what they mean by either. The links, seemingly complaining about iOS or Android, don't really seem to clarify.
It seems many want Unix technology or ideas to be about what Unix meant in the 70s and 80s and don't have much interest in moving things forward from that plateau. (To be clear, I think all the major operating systems of today leave a lot to be desired, but each one has their own pros and cons.)
Aside from the file system parts, my understanding of the idea of Unix is that it is a bunch of small utilities interacting with each other. I think almost anyone agrees with that idea, see functional programming and node based tools that link up data between dedicated functions and nodes, respectively. This idea is quite pervasive, and I don't think it was necessarily Unix that conceived of it. But in reality, the implementation of this idea in Unix leaves a lot to be desired. The collection of utilities that have very few standards in interfacing, documentation, naming, usability, and more importantly, data structures leaves one wanting. The idea that everything should be text is implicit and highly limiting. This is why programming languages that are somewhat OS-like and have their own scripting are so well liked, becuase it removes the need to worry about the various OSes' implementation of these ideas, leaving one to stay at a virtual machine level. For example, Elixir and the BEAM.
It's typically viewed as blasphamous, but I think the PowerShell model is the more powerful one if we're just considering OS-level provided interactions. But even then, restricting oneself to the terminal is limiting. I find the ideas in Smalltalk to be much more powerful and forward thinking, despite being as old as Unix itself.
- bluetomcat 3y agoThe communal spirit of Unix as described by Ritchie back in the day revolves around minicomputers (aka PDP-11) shared in a single organisation, accessible via multiple terminals. A close community of users would log into the system and would eventually come up with their own small tools for a particular purpose. Those oddly-named tools would be adopted by the small community without need for extensive documentation. This is the "Unix spirit" of the 1970s that everyone seems to be referring to.
- dale_glass 3y agoI agree, PowerShell does the same thing better. And I'm disappointed that things have stagnated so much. I mean, cool, a commandline is an useful concept that sometimes fits a given task excellently well. But why in the hell are we still emulating a VT100? How is a modern Linux console sticking to a 50 year old level of functionality? And why are we scripting in something as painful as Bash?
- bluetomcat 3y agoTerminals are a central idea affecting Unix process control and hierarchy, and signal delivery. Emulating them was the easier decision that didn't require any changes to the rest of the system. You introduce a virtual terminal device and the rest stays the same. We are still trapped in those basic abstractions of the 1970s without even noticing them, building shiny stuff on top.
- dale_glass 3y agoI mean, sure, terminals make some sense. But why are we in 2023, and people are still coming up with fancier versions of "top" that try to draw graphs in text? Every modern computer boots to a graphical console. Every terminal emulator in a GUI runs in a graphical environment. Wouldn't be be much nicer and much less awkward to actually use pixels?
- jckahn 3y agoReducing everything to a monospaced text character is a beautiful and simplifying constraint, IMO. It gives me as a user a sense of predictable consistency that I really appreciate.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- flohofwoe 3y agoBecause the UNIX terminal model is mostly "good enough" (and with a recent incarnation like zsh plus Fish-style autosuggestion-plugin the user experience is very different from a plain VT100 terminal from the 70's). PowerShell isn't such a big revolution in user experience that it justifies switching IMHO (and FWIW I don't agree that objects are better than a plain text stream, at least not when the whole thing stops in the terminal - it would probably be different if every Windows application - including all UI applications - would expose their internals as "PowerShell-scriptable objects", then we could probably get an actual productivity jump by glueing small, specialised UI apps together - this was a central idea in the last days of the Amiga which didn't make the jump to other platforms before its demise). Same for the concept of a hierarchical filesystem. Sure, there may be better ideas floating around, but when confronted with reality they are usually not so much better than the "good enough" status quo that current operating systems have arrived at. TL;DR: long-term incremental progress usually beats revolutionary ideas that are poorly executed.
- rob_galvan 3y agoIt gave me the "What did I just read?" feel.