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Not only that, but we're even seeing an opposite trend where people are now actually starting to tear down and attack the principles of Unix that were once so c
by vezzy-fnord 12y ago
Not only that, but we're even seeing an opposite trend where people are now actually starting to tear down and attack the principles of Unix that were once so cherished. The only problem is they're doing it in favor of adopting concepts from consumer operating systems, which is even worse than sticking to the aging primitives of the 1970s, as the latter at least provide a coherent model.
Things are changing in the Linux world. Just not in a particularly positive direction.
Moral of the story: Linguistic relativity (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) is real. It doesn't apply just to human languages, but technology as well. People with broken mindsets will carry over their baggage with them and poison even already mediocre environments.
More depressing though, is the anti-BSD sentiment present amongst many Linux users. Mostly because of how ironic it is.
- jfb 12y agoe.g., "You can write COBOL in any language".
- stefanix 12y agoThe Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a bit dated. Comparative linguistics has shown very convincingly that pretty much all languages have a similar set of complex features. Even languages without a heritage, which are invented within two generations have complex features comparable to established languages. There are many good examples in Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct." Similar to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis I think "broken mindsets," and "poison," are exaggerations with little basis. tl;dr It's really not that depressing. There are different ways of doing the same thing.
- jfb 12y agoI think path dependence and software affordances are sufficient to explain why bad ideas seem to mutate and grow; no need to reach for Sapir-Whorf. It is a lovely metaphor, however.
- pjmlp 12y agoI wish for an alternate reality were Apple still has the success it enjoys, but with Mac OS X based on BeOS. UNIX had a few nice ideas, but so did other OS, there is hardly a reason to have it in a pedestal.
- mwcampbell 12y agoIn your opinion, what would be the advantages of a Mac OS X based on BeOS rather than BSD Unix? Or is your point merely that a Unix monoculture is inherently bad? (I think it's more like a common ancestor than a monoculture, though perhaps the descendants haven't diverged very far.)
- pjmlp 12y agoDiversity. It would have been BeOS vs UNIX vs Windows, instead of UNIX vs Windows on the desktop. All monocultures are bad. What happened is that now young developer generations think that UNIX and Windows are the only OS in town and disregard all the other ones out there being used. As such they only focus their efforts into UNIX way, instead of trying to come up with new ideas. For example, how to move away from C for systems programming, when C is married with UNIX? This is just one example.
- Zardoz84 12y agoAmigaOS have some interesting different things.
- the_af 12y agoWhat fundamental thing would change if Apple changed the foundation of their desktop OS to something other than Unix? Of all the things about Apple that could be changed, I'd say the underlying technology of their OS is the least interesting.
- pjmlp 12y agoA desktop OS done in C++ instead of C. Database based filesystem. The way multi-core programming was present across whole OS.