[DonHopkins]

20 years doesn't even get you back to the last century, it's more like 48 years since 1977 when Bourne wrote sh. As one of the authors of the Unix Haters Handbook, published relatively recently in 1994, and someone who's used many versions of Unix since the 1980's, of course I'm fully aware that those problems are hell of a lot more than 20 years old, and that's the whole point: we're still suffering from their "vestigial historic baggage", arcane syntax and semantics originally intended to fork processes and pipe text to solve trivial tasks instead of using shared libraries and machine instructions to perform simple math operations, and people are still trying to justify all that claptrap as the "Unix Philosophy".

Care to explain to me how all the problems of X-Windows have been solved so it's no longer valid to criticize the fallout from its legacy vestigial historic baggage we still suffer from even today? How many decades ago did they first promise the Year of the Linux Desktop?

The X-Windows Disaster: This is Chapter 7 of the UNIX-HATERS Handbook. The X-Windows Disaster chapter was written by Don Hopkins.

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-x-windows-disaster-128d39...

Why it took THREE processes and a shitload of context switches and punctuation that we are still stuck with to simply test if 1 + 1 = 2 in classic Unix [TM]:

  [ "$(expr 1 + 1)" -eq 2 ]

Breakdown:

  expr 1 + 1

An external program used to perform arithmetic.

  $(...) (Command substitution)

Runs expr in a subshell to capture its output.

  [ ... ]

In early shells, [ (aka test) was also an external binary.

It took THREE separate processes because:

Unix lacked built-in arithmetic.

The shell couldn't do math.

Even conditionals ([) were external.

Everything was glued together with fragile text and subprocesses.

All of this just to evaluate a single arithmetic expression by ping-ponging in and out of user and kernel space so many times -- despite the CPU being able to do it in a single cycle.

That’s exactly the kind of historical inefficiency the "Unix Philosophy" retroactively romanticizes.

[op00to]

> The X-Windows Disaster: This is Chapter 7 of the UNIX-HATERS Handbook. The X-Windows Disaster chapter was written by Don Hopkins.

This gave me a big laugh, I love the UNIX-haters Handbook despite loving UNIXy systems. Thank you for decades of enjoyment and learning, especially in my late-90s impressionable youth.

[chubot]

I'm aware it used to be that way, but it's long been fixed

It's fine to hate Unix, but you should update your examples :)

[pjmlp]

It has been fixed on Linux distributions, which aren't UNIX.

And even that, only bash, because I wouldn't consider the state of X Windows and Wayland fixed in any way, shape, or form.

[jillyboel]

UNIX is dead, no one cares anymore. It's just Linux now. Your examples and complaints are both outdated and not in good faith.

For all the weirdos smashing that downvote button: How about you name me some UNIX distros you have ran in the past year? Other than Linux, OpenBSD (~0.1% market share btw) and ostensibly MacOS (which we all know has dropped any pretense of caring to be UNIX-like many years ago), that is.

[int_19h]

macOS is literally certified Unix.

[jillyboel]

Sure, but it's not actually. Everyone knows that everything you do for macos needs macos specific exceptions.

[DonHopkins]

Obviously and obliviously spoken by someone who never used a Real Unix System back in the day that EVERY Unix system needed MANY specific exceptions.

[int_19h]

Yes, because apps are written for Linux first, and Linux isn't Unix.

[pjmlp]

AIX and Solaris, Oxide uses Illumos, a Solaris fork.

Orbit OS on the PlayStation.

On embedded space, with various levels of POSIX compliancy without being Linux distributions, QNX, vxWorks, INTEGRITY, NuttX, FreeRTOS, Zephyr, RTEMS.

[jillyboel]

Thanks for proving my point

[DonHopkins]

I'll update my examples when your examples of how it's been fixed don't use the same arcane syntax and semantics as the 48 year old Bourne shell. That's the whole point, which you're still missing.

> $ bash -c '[ $((1 + 1)) = 2 ]; echo $?'

Not even Perl uses that much arcane punctuation to test if 1 + 1 = 2. As if [] isn't enough, you've got to throw in two more levels of (()), plus enough grawlix profanity for a Popeye comic strip. And people complain Lisp has too many parens. Sheez.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grawlix

There's even an emoji for Unix shell syntax:

https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+1F92C

[Datagenerator]

What are good shells in your opinion?

[DonHopkins]

I prefer ITS DDT (aka HACTRN), with its built-in PDP-10 assembler and disassembler, that lets you do things like your login file customizing your prompt in assembly code to print the time by making system calls, without actually spawning any sub-jobs to merely print the time:

https://gunkies.org/wiki/ITS_DDT_Guide

  ..PROMPT
      holds the instruction which DDT uses to type out a "*".
      You can replace it with any other instruction.
      To use "%" instead of "*", deposit $1#%$> in that location
      ($> to avoid clobbering the opcode without having 
      to know what it is)

If you have to use arcane syntax and grawlix profanity, you should at least have direct efficient access to the full power of the CPU and operating system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incompatible_Timesharing_Syste...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_debugging_technique

https://web.archive.org/web/20061011004003/http://www.sigfs....

https://its.victor.se/wiki/luser

https://www.hactrn.net/sra/alice/alices.pdp10

https://gunkies.org/wiki/Incompatible_Timesharing_System

(I recognize that photo I took of MIT-MC at the MIT-AI Lab!)

https://gunkies.org/wiki/File:Mit-mc.jpg

Even the Apple ][ Integer Basic monitor ROMs had a build-in mini assembler and disassembler.

https://www.ldx.ca/notes/apple2-notes.html

[cruffle_duffle]

I keep submitting PR’s to get my assembler extensions in Fish and ZSH but so far no avail. Ideally all scripting should be done in single-clock-cycle assembly statements.

I mean it makes write-only languages like Perl look like beautiful prose but it’s hard to argue about efficiently setting the 20 environment variables used by my terraform jobs with a mere 20 clock cycles. It may seem silly but every clock cycle truly matters.

[thedrexster]

it's not silly! <3

[anthk]

rc and 9front's philosophy. Unix, but better and removing all the cruft.

[wazoox]

I love "the Unix Haters Handbook", just as I love "Worse is Better", but this ship has sailed 30 years ago as you mentioned. Your "old man yelling at clouds" rant reminds me of Bjarne Stroustrup's quip, "there are two type of languages, those everyone complains about and those nobody uses". I mean run your nice, coherent, logical LISP machine or Plan9 system of whatever is that you prefer, but let us enjoy our imperfect tools and their philosophy :)

[DonHopkins]

The Unix philosophy really comes down to: "I have a hammer, and everything is a nail."

ESR's claptrap book The Art of Unix Programming turns Unix into philosophy-as-dogma, where flaws are reframed as virtues. His book romanticizes history and ignores inconvenient truths. He's a self-appointed and self-aggrandizing PR spokesperson, not a designer, and definitely not a hacker, and he overstates and over-idealizes the Unix way, as well as and his own skills and contributions. Plus he's an insufferable unrepentant racist bigot.

Don't let historical accident become sacred design. Don’t confuse an ancient workaround with elegant philosophy. We can, and should, do better.

Philosophies need scrutiny, not reverence.

Tools should evolve, not stagnate.

And sometimes, yelling at clouds stirs the winds of change.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy#Criticism

>In a 1981 article entitled "The truth about Unix: The user interface is horrid" published in Datamation, Don Norman criticized the design philosophy of Unix for its lack of concern for the user interface. Writing from his background in cognitive science and from the perspective of the then-current philosophy of cognitive engineering, he focused on how end-users comprehend and form a personal cognitive model of systems—or, in the case of Unix, fail to understand, with the result that disastrous mistakes (such as losing an hour's worth of work) are all too easy.

Donald A. Norman: The truth about Unix: The user interface is horrid:

http://www.ceri.memphis.edu/people/smalley/ESCI7205_misc_fil...

>In the podcast On the Metal, game developer Jonathan Blow criticised UNIX philosophy as being outdated. He argued that tying together modular tools results in very inefficient programs. He says that UNIX philosophy suffers from similar problems to microservices: without overall supervision, big architectures end up ineffective and inefficient.

On the Metal: Jonathan Blow:

https://archive.org/details/on-the-metal-jonathan-blow

>Well, the Unix philosophy for example it has been inherited by Windows to some degree even though it's a different operating system, right? The Unix philosophy of you have all these small programs that you put together in two like Waves, I think is wrong. It's wrong for today and it was also picked up by Plan Nine as well and so -

>It's micro services, micro services are an expression of Unix philosophy, so the Unix philosophy, I've got a complicated relationship with Unix philosophy. Jess, I imagine you do too, where it's like, I love it, I love a pipeline, I love it when I want to do something that is ad hoc, that is not designed to be permanent because it allows me- and you were getting inside this earlier about Rust for video games and why maybe it's not a fit in terms of that ability to prototype quickly, Unix philosophy great for ad hoc prototyping.

>[...] All this Unix stuff, it's the sort of the same thing, except instead of libraries or crates, you just have programs, and then you have like your other program that calls out to the other programs and pipes them around, which is, as far from strongly typed as you can get. It’s like your data coming in a stream on a pipe. Other things about Unix that seemed cool, well, in the last point there is just to say- we've got two levels of redundancy that are doing the same thing. Why? Get rid of that. Do that do the one that works and then if you want a looser version of that, maybe you can have a version of a language that just doesn't type check and use that for your crappy spell. There it is.

>[...] It went too far. That's levels of redundancy that where one of the levels is not very sound, but adds a great deal of complexity. Maybe we should put those together. Another thing about Unix that like- this is maybe getting more picky but one of the cool philosophical things was like, file descriptors, hey, this thing could be a file on disk or I could be talking over the network, isn't it so totally badass, that those are both the same thing? In a nerd kind of way, like, sure, that's great but actually, when I'm writing software, I need to know whether I'm talking over the network or to a file. I'm going to do very different things in both of those cases. I would actually like them to be different things, because I want to know what things that I could do to one that I'm not allowed to do to another, and so forth.

>Yes, and I am of such mixed mind. Because it's like, it is a powerful abstraction when it works and when it breaks, it breaks badly.

[skydhash]

No tool is perfect. The unix philosophy is a philosophy, not a dogma. It serves well in some use cases. And in the other use case, you’re perfectly fine to put the whole domain in a single program. The hammer has been there for millennia, but once we invented screw, we had to invent the screwdriver.

[int_19h]

The point is that Unix philosophy is mostly a retroactive justification of why things are the way they are, and not really a coherent philosophy that drove the design of those things, even though it is now often represented as such.

[flavio81]

Correct. The Unix philosophy is based on hagiography.

[skydhash]

That's the point of philosophy: to give a coherent, empirical explanation on why that thing is good or bad.

[sbuk]

"The unix philosophy is a philosophy, not a dogma"

Shame that it is dogmatically followed by a very loud but vocal minority.

[wazoox]

> And sometimes, yelling at clouds stirs the winds of change.

> "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." George Bernard Shaw.

Man, I'm with you, but I'll put my efforts elsewhere :)

[michaelsbradley]

What’s that famous Bangles song?

[flavio81]

>As one of the authors of the Unix Haters Handbook

One day, one remote day, mankind will attain Reason and will award you a Nobel Prize for speaking out loud against retrograde computing.

I salute you, hero, veteran.