Comment by Dr_tldr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Dr_tldr | Hacker News Reader

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Unix isn't for end users, it's for developers to build on top of to give things to end users. Linux on desktop already happened years and years ago if you work for a tech company, and that's probably about as far as it needs to go.

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/04/lisp-is-not-acceptab...

This is Steve Yegge's understanding of the Lisp community, and I should clarify that I don't think the XML monstrosities we all work with are "all their fault", but that, on the whole, the Lisp community and enterprise coders were mutually antagonistic.

Javascript after ES3 really wasn't broken at all, just most people coding in it didn't know how to take advantage of it. No language can prevent someone dedicated to bad code architecture from writing bad code. A Lisp programmer would've found a lot of comfortable features and powerful patterns and been able to share them, but most of their efforts were wasted denouncing everyone outside of their tiny sect. The end result was that most people learning JavaScript were taught how to code like it was broken Java because most of the resources were written by Enterprise Java devs who didn't understand what a fundamentally impoverished language Java is.

Thanks for the link to that post. I'd also advise to read through its comment though - some people there, especially Pascal Costanza, point out quite a lot of problems that basically reduce it to ranting of a person who doesn't understand the language and the culture he's writing about ;).

Also, the influx of enterprise patterns into JavaScript is quite a recent phenomenon - personally, I blame Google (who, for a reason I can't understand to this day, embraces enterprise-level Java as their primary platform for everything...), but regardless, the problem with JavaScript culture is mostly that of very fast growth coupled with lack of experience and (probably unwilling) ignorance of the past. Since this community basically controls the Internet, it's hard for voices expressing some restraint and thoughtfulness to get trough the noise.

And I really do recommend The Unix-Haters Handbook. Funny thing is - over a decade ago, when I was acquainting myself with the Linux world (after many years of DOS and Windows experience), I've been noticing and complaining about various things that felt wrong or even asinine. Gradually I got convinced by people I considered smarter than me that those things are not bugs but features, they're how a Good Operating System works, etc. Only now I realize that my intuition back then was right, but I got Stockolm-syndromed to accept the insanity. Like most of the world. The sad thing is, there were better solutions in the past, which once again shows how IT is probably the only industry that's totally ignorant of its own history and constantly running in circles.

What part of UHH do you think is not obsolete? I dislike many aspects of Unix, but it seems like 90% of the book is either wrong, meaningless invective, or obsolete. It's hard to view it as of more than historical value -- which is a shame, because Unix is far from perfect.

To clarify, I'm about half of the way through the book, and I have found a couple arguably-correct points. Complaints about Usenet and Unix vendors have mostly gone the way of the dodo. The author consistently ignores any distinction between the filesystem and the rest of the OS, which may have been accurate at the time of writing, but hasn't been true for decades. Similarly, we don't distinguish between a given shell and Unix as a whole, even though the book makes explicit mention that other shells exist. And why there is a chapter on Usenet passes understanding. Suggesting that shell expansion be handled by an external library is equally bizarre. So far the valid points are: * command input syntax is inconsistent. I don't know that this has a feasible solution, but it is true. * tar specifically sucks * sendmail configuration sucks

The real crime of UHH is that it merely hates, it does not instruct. When we do find valid criticisms, there is no suggestion for how to fix things, or how other OSes are better at the same role. I've resigned myself to read the entirety, but for all the authors' complaints about not learning anything from history, one can only feel like they have themselves to blame.

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