Re: Re: Learning from history - The UNIX-Hater's Handbook (Peter Quirk)

Thus quoth Andreas Fuchs on Mon, Sep 15, 2003 at 08:14:19AM +0000:
> 
> a) applications crash, leaving core dump files lying around (or not). No

Applications sometimes crash. Good applications rarely crash. Don't tell
us that other OSes are perfect. 

> b) Command syntax is garbled (think also shell quoting rules). Nasty
>    command names abound. For which command is "grep" an abbreviation?

Compared to what? JCL? CCL? DCL? Rexx? Ah, I understand. You want your
computer to talk to you and have perfect speech recognition in your
native Swahili language and articial intelligence too.

> c) When you encounter a kernel bug (and subsequent crash), you have
>    lost.

That is only the case for OSes like Windows for which there is no 
documentation. Closed-source Unices have documentation so you start
up 'crash' and figure out what went wrong. For Linux you just send
a bug report to the kernel mailing list and it may even get fixed
for you.
 
> d) You get to write programs in languages such as C, which force you to
>    go through a cycle of
>    write-compile(&fix-errors)-run-crash-debug-(&fix-errors). This
>    development cycle, I'm sure, is responsible for "good enough" tools
>    such as make[1] and other berkeley abominations.

If you don't like it, use a high-level programming language or even Java.

> e) The entire Unix Hater's Handbook chapter on X window with the
>    exception of speed issues still holds. As an addition, there is now
>    XAuth and SSH forwarding to worry about.

I agree. The GUI is the ultimate annoyance. The worst OS is MacOS, which
does not even have a proper User Interface.

> Unix or Linux is by far not the last word in User Interface
> Design. People have gotten it right (or at least, more right)

A TV set is easier to use than a computer. For word processing, use
paper and pencil.

> before. And, amazingly, this "getting right" wasn't done in UNIX. There
> are amazingly useful data structures out there. Why then do we need to
> use tools that were written in the 1970s, to fix 1970s issues, operating
> on One data structure, the stream of bytes without structure, most of
> which focus on working around the issues arising from the use of exactly
> this data structure?

Other OSes have many kinds of structured files. Unix uses the model of 
a stream of bytes without structure. This is very much what like about 
Unix in the first place. (Microsoft were smart enough to copy this)

Kind regards,



Daniel von Asmuth

-- 
  	If Gates had meant us to use Windows, 
	He would have given us three hands.