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Unix is in no way perfect, for that look to Plan 9. ;-) But just as one should try and understand the idioms and style of a programming language rather than wri
by ralph 14y ago
Unix is in no way perfect, for that look to Plan 9. ;-) But just as one should try and understand the idioms and style of a programming language rather than write Pascal in it regardless, so one should try and embrace Unix then suffer and learn from its warts rather than write VMS DCL in it.
And yes, brevity is pretty fundamental to its early culture. Unix was created by mathematicians and scientists that were using it every work day to get stuff down and they recognised and extolled in their writings the power of notation. Imagine maths without superscripts, Σ, etc. So it is with Unix. More wordy notations existed in other OSes at the time, and more noisy commands, e.g. VMS would tell you that "dir/size/owner/prot foo." completed normally, even though that's hopefully the norm. It gets very annoying. :-)
- spc476 14y agoUnix was developed on a system with a 110 baud teletype. On such a system, brevity was the path to sanity (seriously, imagine programming on a manual typewriter that only supported 10 characters per second). VMS was written later, with a faster interface. Also, you didn't need to specify the entire long option, you only needed to type enough to disambiguate between "/all" and "/almostall" (for instance).
- ralph 14y agoThe constraints of the time shouldn't be confused with their recognition of the power of notation. Also, based on the poor advice of this thread's subject, surely one should always write /almostall in one's DCL script for clarity and to lessen the chance of ambiguity as the command evolves? grep's -i is only ever going to mean -i. VMS died, DCL was often ridiculed, its over-verbose style was a part of that. Its lack of power played a larger part.
- iheartfisting 14y agoPlan 9 seems to be the new obscure hipster vogue at the moment.