Mixing together Linux and Unix? Saying that killing a process from command line in Linux is bad because MacOS has GUI for that? Not explaining in more detail a claim that C is responsible for Spectre? Topping a technical presentation with political statements?
That's too much for 30 minutes I think.
I went into this video agreeing with the stated premise (and still do), but this presentation was a bit underwhelming.
He said trying to paper over the concurrency of the hardware to provide the simple in-order model C expects is responsible for Spectre (and he did explain how Spectre works). This is true but I don't think C is really the reason for this; designing a language that productively exposes parallelism but is easy to program the kinds of things that run fast on modern amd64 CPUs, I think that might be an unsolved problem.
He wasn't saying that `ps | grep | kill` is bad because MacOS has a GUI. He was saying that it is bad (it is, that's pretty undeniable), and that dogmatically following the "Unix philosophy" would lead you to conclude that it is great, even though there's an obviously better way to do it (through a nice GUI).
To put it another way, "do one thing and do it well" is fine, if all of your users are happy to write all the glue to stick tiny programs together, and the only glue you have is completely unstructured text streams. But most people are not willing to do that.
To take it to an obvious extreme: what is the Unix version of Excel? `set_cell A4 'hello' && recalculate_formula B5 && cat A1:D2 | pi_chart`??
That's a nice question. It's not that obvious extreme for me though.
You could use sc and GNU plot (I know... GNU's not Unix). Simple example:
- first you configure your plot
$ echo "set terminal png\nset output 'plot.png'\nplot '/dev/stdin' with lines" > plotcfg.plg
- then you create a spreadsheet and pass it to gnuplot. It's easier to edit the spreadsheet with sc's TUI
$ echo 'let A0 = 1\nlet B0 = 8\nlet A1 = 2\nlet B1 = 16\nlet A2 = 3\nlet B2 = 32\n' | sc -W '%' - | gnuplot plotcfg.plg
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479
It has been discussed previously multiple times here at HN, the latest from three weeks ago.