[gens]

>True enough, but as a younger programmer, I find it pretty reasonable to look back at computer systems of the 70s and wonder if we can do better today. I feel a little bit gross every time I have to write a bash shell script (or edit config files that aren't JSON/XML/YAML, for that matter), and I don't think that's a bad impulse. That something so inelegant and unsafe is still in widespread use in 2017 really ought to be a scandal.

As a relatively young programmer i look at the computer systems of the 70's and think to myself "what the fuck are programmers thinking when writing today's programs". I mean we got amazing tools and a plethora of amazing languages, an insane amount of memory and an idiotic amount of processing power, chips specialized for sound and even ones for visuals. And yet everything lags.

As for shell scripts, they are fine. Not that you have to use them, as you can use python, scheme, anything (even C with tcc).

As for XML... oh god.. it is the worst, the absolute worst, way to do config files. Jesus help, is it awful. Bad for the user, bad for the processor. Simple key–value pairs (as in "power_level: 9000") are good enough for almost all configuration. Hell even the INI format is faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar better then XML (and YAML, JSON (although these are themselves better then XML)).

I look at the 70's and think "haven't we learned any fucking thing ?".

PS On topic, the Unix philosophy is still valid. For a plethora of reasons. I typed too much already but if anyone's interested in my "opinion" i'l write it later today. PPS The author of this piece doesn't even know what "the Unix philosophy" exactly is.

[pjc50]

XML is nasty, but at least it's nasty in standardised ways. I've definitely worked with worse (e.g. Cadence DEF files).

The lag should be regarded as intolerable, but instead it's routine. I shouldn't have to wait for computers like this.

Shell is a nice idea, but UNIX should either have banned whitespace in filenames or made the shell handle it properly. It's amazing how many things blow up on encountering a space, and you can upset people even further by putting newlines in your file names.

[gens]

ftp://ftp.slackware.org.uk/slackware/slackware64-14.2/ChangeLog.txt

Just ctrl+f for "xml". (edit: nvm, only 3 reports are bugs. although the libxml2 report has 3 somewhat serious bugs)

"XML is a well established standard" is usually the reason people choose XML for anything. I guess i would add "Nobody got fired for choosing XML" to the list of such sayings, if i had such a list.

[stillsut]

> what the fuck are programmers thinking when writing today's programs

The difference is in the old days, you adapted to computer. Now, computer must adapt to you.

Take a look at MS's latest text-editor program's release notes (https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_10). They have to build a program that accommodates so many different existing must-have features (from a potential users POV), and for each feature, accommodate almost every flavor of configuration that has ever existed for any other text editor whose style the potential user is now "locked-in to". Otherwise user will refuse to adopt.

In the 70's, I assume the audience was a pretty tight knit community of computer engineers, coming from a time of very frustrating tooling where it wouldn't be uncommon to lose a day's work because the 'Save' function failed or something like that. In this environment, you learned the crazy unintuitive keymap for vi and called it a blessing.

Now, you yell at your editor if it doesn't remind you to save your work when you close it. Or you yell at it when it does remind you; too many pop-ups! The point is that user preferences are more fragmented and expectations are higher for features, and willingness to learn details and gotchas of a program are lower, which has created the bloated program for the simple things like text editors.

[gens]

As a contrast, I use sublime. It has (almost) everything I desire. And it saves everything i write, even in the case of a power outage.

Another example would be Acme[0].

>The point is that user preferences are more fragmented and expectations are higher for features, and willingness to learn details and gotchas of a program are lower, which has created the bloated program for the simple things like text editors.

I agree. People are people and people will always be subjective. But there should be a distinction between feature bloat and node.js bloat. Still, ofc, to each his own. (I measure how good it is for me by how much hair i pull out by using it, be it by lack of features, bugs, performance, or anything)

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M and https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin...

[shakna]

This might sound odd.

Instead of writing bash scripts, learn awk.

Awk is old, much older than bash, and has largely gone unchanged since '89.

But, despite the fact it was born in an era where we were still nailing down PLT and what was important in a language, it ticks a lot of boxes.

Having written some sizeable (5000+ LOC) programs in it, it kind of feels like a dynamic mash up of C, and Lisp.

Try Awk, and see if quick scripts are still as painful.

[jnunoferreira]

Yup, XML is ugly to write by hand, but I'd argue it is nearly as legible as YAML/JSON, with the great-great advantage of being able to be structurally validated.