Comment by debdrup | Hacker News Reader

Comment by debdrup | Hacker News Reader

I'm a sysadmin, not a programmer, so maybe that's why it seems like the Haskell solution is more complicated to me - but can someone explain why a supposed improvement for something is more complicated, and involves a bunch of stuff that can't be expected to be included on any Unix-like system you sit down in front of?

It's especially confusing, considering that the blogger claims to have changed their opinion, but doesn't bother to clarify what has changed on the new blog that he "helpfully" links to. It's also interesting that the author claims that McIllroy would approve of his solution, without checking with him. McIllroys email isn't exactly hidden if you know where to look, and I know he still posts on a few mailing lists regularily, so it's not like he's completely unavailable.

McIlroys solution works on any POSIX compatible system. Feel free to check for yourself: http://shellhaters.org/

I agree with you, the Haskell solution is worse. But I disagree with some of your reasons.

Forget the ubiquity of Unix. Forget POSIX--McIlroy's text was written before even the first drafts of POSIX.

Part of the premise of the challenge to Knuth was to use his solution to advocate for his programming system: WEB (essentially a variant of Pascal)--look how great it is to program in WEB! So naturally, McIlroy included in his response a comparison to his programming system: UNIX. Knuth had designed WEB to make programming nicer; McIlroy had designed UNIX[1] to make programming nicer. It wasn't just a showdown between word count programs, it was a showdown of WEB vs UNIX.

And to hear some people tell it, the things that lead to Unix's victory in that little showdown are the same things that lead to its ubiquity today. If people liked Knuth's solution better, maybe we'd have WEB/Pascal systems everywhere instead of Unix.

[1]: He wasn't the sole designer, but he did invent pipes, which is the big item in using the Unix shell as a programming model.

It's a bit of an unfair comparison though. The problem and tool set were predefined before Knuth started. Also it's a problem that's particularly suited to Unix tools. There are many problems where Web might have resulted in the better solution. As a kid, I saw a program that computed the position of Moon in the sky given a location and time. That would probably be better solved with WEB than Unix pipes.

Yes, it is more complicated. However, it is doing more: type checking, which is useful when the program needs to be changed, and potential for future optimizations, as mentioned in the article.

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