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My OS course was my first real exposure to the depths of UNIX and C. Being used to Python, I quickly got fed up with how archaic and arcane most of the UNIX/C APIs are. I have a feeling that, if it were judged by even somewhat modern software engineering standards, it would be panned.

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Care to enlighten us the exact APIs you consider archaic? "Unix/C APIs" isn't exactly precise --- there are the POSIX APIs which are fairly standard that Linux and the BSDs mostly support; in addition, there are the platform-specific APIs that are constantly updated for modern use-cases. I find most of these APIs intuitive and stable.

In contrast, I don't like some of Python's abstractions, the "subprocess" being (IMO) a particularly weird way to abstract a pipe.

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