8 ms·
Andy Tanenbaum hasn't learned anything
- beza1e1 17y ago17 years later: Plan9 is going nowhere. That commercial spin off Vita Nuovo (http://www.vitanuova.com/ http://www.vitanuova.com/) is quiet. The Linux and Solaris monolithic kernels are still strong. Minix3 doesn't really progress (http://groups.google.com/group/minix3 http://groups.google.com/group/minix3). The L4 microkernel is commercially successful (http://www.ok-labs.com/ http://www.ok-labs.com/).
- vinutheraj 17y agoDoes commercial success or popularity imply technically sound and superior ?
- mahmud 17y agoNo, sometimes Worse is Better. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
- SwellJoe 17y agoIn the case of UNIX, it's not merely commercial success and popularity. It is the choice of a large portion of the smartest people working in technology. If we were talking about success amongst the hoi palloi (like, say, Windows), then your point would stand...but we're not. UNIX has seen its fortunes flounder and flourish multiple times over the span of 30+ years, and yet, today, UNIX runs the most important technologies on earth (Google, Amazon, the majority of all other web applications, the best smart phones, most smart devices with anything more powerful than a simple microcontroller, and a whole lot more), because the people building them chose UNIX. So, is UNIX technically sound and superior? In the general case, I would say, unequivocally, yes.
- shalmanese 17y agoIt seems like almost all of this can be attributed to path dependence rather than technological superiority.
- praptak 17y agoPath dependence in case of Google, Amazon, smartphones, websites? What kind of 'path' did they have behind them that would make them unix-dependent?
- billswift 17y agoThe strength of path dependence and network effects in the economy is overrated, see the book "Winners, Losers, and Microsoft", http://www.amazon.com/Winners-Losers-Microsoft-Stan-Liebowitz/dp/0945999844/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253657307&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Winners-Losers-Microsoft-Stan-Liebowit... , for a pretty thorough discussion.
- tayssir 17y agoKernighan and Mashey mentioned in "The UNIX Programming Environment" (1981): "Success or failure often depends on nontechnical factors, whose importance often goes unrecognized by those who evaluate systems on purely technical terms." And they go on to mention some of these nontechnical factors, such as having started out on the DEC PDP-11. In Ken Thompson's Turing Award speech, he claimed: "I can't help but feel that I am receiving this honor for timing and serendipity as much as technical merit. UNIX swept into popularity with an industry-wide change from central main frames to autonomous minis. I suspect that Daniel Bobrow (1) would be here instead of me if he could not afford a PDP-10 and and had to "settle" for a PDP-11." http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html Similar fate apparently happened due to the specialization of the MIT AI Lab's ITS: "Of course, ITS wasn't portable by any stretch of the imagination. It was an operating system in the old school of development, and it died rather suddenly when DEC announced that they were discontinuing the PDP-10 and its descendants in favor of the PDP-11 and VAX systems." http://www.crackmonkey.org/unix.html http://www.crackmonkey.org/unix.html (Personally, I only use a UNIX because it's a tool of the trade. It's free, or built into Macs. I don't enjoy it, but I use it, and found the _Unix Hater's Handbook_ refreshing.) http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/weise/uhh-download.html http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/weise/uhh-download.html
- ilyak 17y agoI hate hardware. Hardware is the thing that prevents microkernels with carefully distributed functions. But hardware is still land where dragons are, therefore you have to do everything with it in kernel-space (it's unsafe and isn't delegatable mostly). If hardware would soon die and we'd be programming on the turing machine, we'd get microkernel OSes in no time!
- mseebach 17y ago> If hardware would soon die and we'd be programming on the turing machine, we'd get microkernel OSes in no time! That'd be da bomb.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- ilyak 17y ago"Name a product that succeeds by running UNIX as an application." Hmhm, Xen? I think I'd name quite a few.
- rincewind 17y agoCygwin, Interix (a.k.a. SFU) on Windows NT
- bad_user 17y agoWould you trust your application to run in production on a Cygwin machine?
- ilyak 17y agoWhy not? Thousands of applications run on Cygwin just fine. There's no reason to mistrust Cygwin more than you mistrust, say, MFC. However in most cases you can delpoy to a more optimal platform (actual UNIX).
- rbanffy 17y agoI wouldn't trust my apps to run on a Windows machine, period. Running them under Cygwin, at least makes them easily portable to more refined environments.
- Confusion 17y agoThat existed in 1992?