3 ms·

Plenty of people question it, it's just that good. Questioning simplicity is a futile exercise. At best you can question whether it is simple enough (see Minix)

• asciilifeform 17y ago
  > Questioning simplicity is a futile exercise Why do you assume that simplicity necessarily equals Unix? Many of its design decisions were not mathematical inevitabilities, but are merely artifacts of hardware limitations which no longer exist: http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/05/17/386bsd/print.html http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/05/17/386bsd/prin... "The Jolitzes believed that from its origins as a series of quick, if elegant, hacks, Unix had hardened into a series of unquestioned rituals for getting things done. Many of these rituals were fossils -- work-arounds for hardware that no longer existed. "It's amazing how much we were still tied to the past," Lynne says. "The physical machines had been hauled away, but elements of the operating systems are still being implemented in the same way." She believes today's Linux and BSD developers are carrying on that unhelpful tradition. "It's like they're doing incantations," she says. "They're repeating what they've been taught, and they don't know what it means."