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I've come to believe that the "just reboot" mindset is a rotten one that has done severe damage to computer technology and the people that work on it. It was a
by seabird 2y ago
I've come to believe that the "just reboot" mindset is a rotten one that has done severe damage to computer technology and the people that work on it. It was a compromise that made sense in its place and time, but we've seen firsthand that safety, reliability, correctness, etc. are impossible to bolt on after the fact, and 50 years of commitment to that compromise has resulted in mountains of shit that will never work quite right that go on to generate more mountains of shit that will never work quite right. Decades upon decades of machines unfathomably more powerful than the PDPs UNIX was written for still kowtow to its deficiencies and mental shortcuts. I wonder if anybody who has been along for the whole ride has any regrets.
- cryptonector 2y agoI don't think Microsoft got it from Bell Labs. "Just reboot" isn't Ritchie's invention so much as what you do when you're writing code in a too-small team and in a hurry in a crappy systems programming language. Since teams are always too small (else they are too large), and everyone is always in a hurry, the real problem is the programming language. C's arrays-decay-to-pointers sin is the original sin here, but it's not for nothing that it's taken so long to get systems programming languages that have manual memory management and are memory-safe: that's a hard problem!