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Comment by wendroid | Hacker News Reader

18. GNU is not Unix

This and the post by silentbicycle above [1] make the point that GNOME abandoned the Unix philosophy to provide a more Windows-style monolithic GUI program.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1059853

It isn't even about GNOME and GUIs, but things like this (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1037509). You don't need to add an "overwrite in-place" option to sed when you can add it to everything by making it its own command. Unix design concerns how functionality is factored at the level between programs, not just between objects in a program.

See "cat -v considered harmful" (http://gaul.org/files/cat_-v_considered_harmful.html). GNU just does bloat bigger and better. (Compare BSD make and GNU make, for starters.)

There are advantages to having overwrite-in-place as an option. If sed is passed a malformed expression, or for whatever reason is unable to operate, the file is untouched. A separate program would clobber it.

Better to have the separate program than everything to implement its own version, but having both isn't necessarily bad.

> A separate program would clobber it.

Nope, you can check the return value from the program(s) run inside of it and revert to the backup file if there's a problem. You really don't need it to be handled specifically by sed.

There's actually an example script that does exactly that in _The Unix Programming Environment_, called 'overwrite', on page 154.

After the introduction of Windows 95, it was clear that the free software universe was lacking a number of technologies and that we were lagging behind in various areas.

At Microsoft I learned the truth about ActiveX and COM and I got very interested in it inmediately [sic]. Upon my return to Mexico Federico and I started to design a GUI control infrastructure for Unix that we code named `GNOME'.

"The Story of the GNOME project" http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/gnome-history.html

or "How one man ruined everything"

"In a world of small programs that did one thing well and communicated via text-based protocols... One man sought to challenge the system."

Unix is simple. It just takes a genius to understand its simplicity. - Dennis Ritchie

The X server has to be the biggest program I've ever seen that doesn't do anything for you. - ken

Can you explain what you mean by that?

The BSD user in me completely agrees; I'd just like to know if that's what you intended.

GNU does not follow the Unix Philosophy and BSD can't talk either

'cat came back from Berkeley waving flags' - Rob Pike

"GNU's Not Unix!" is actually what the GNU acronym stands for. To verify go to http://www.gnu.org/ and search for that phrase.

It's an irony missed on many people.

Sorry, I clicked the arrow next to +1 and downvoted you.

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