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by pjc50
2428 days ago
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It's certainly an interesting critique, but it also massively oversells itself and is totally lacking in self-awareness if you take it seriously. Computing is absolutely full of widely deployed working technologies that enable people to get work done all day but that have rough edges. For every one of these, there is somebody saying that you should use <pet technology> instead. Usually with missionary levels of zeal. And yet at no point do they seriously address why people might have good reasons for adopting the allegedly inferior solution. |
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With an emphasis on "allegedly" sometimes. For example, C is hugely superior to Python in terms of machine efficiency. Does C support faster development cycles? That's right, you can write code that's practically as fast as tightly-optimized machine code! Does C prevent potentially catastrophic errors? That's right, you can write code that's practically as fast as tightly-optimized machine code! A lot of the True Zealots aren't quite as monomaniacal on a single narrow point, but the lack of ability to see a total solution is diagnostic.
So was ITS better than Unix? Not if you prioritize usability, support for application software, or ability to run on more than a single family of very expensive mainframe computers the world had begun to abandon by the time Unix hit its big growth phase. You can say similar things about LispMs, although they were more usable.