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Comment by WesternStar | Hacker News Reader

I see this kind of talking about stuff like the Unix way and existing conventions and programs. I almost have to ask myself when did we end up in a mausoleum. The Unix way is just a guideline from a time some folks wrote some code. A seminal and important time. Its just one(perhaps of many) piece of anecdata. Old code is old code. It's useful but the patterns and conventions it was built on may no longer be relevant. It is not obvious apriori that it is worthwhile to preserve existing conventions and not break existing code.

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The conventions "Do one thing and do it well", and "Don't break the user experience" are not threadbare or shabby. Not UNIX nor its derivatives did spring fully formed from the foreheads of K̶n̶u̶t̶h̶ Thompson or Ritchie; it was written as a series of counterpoints to the prevailing designs and implementations of the day.

To us the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place is hallowed ground. You wander far from the graves of your ancestors and seemingly without regret.

Donald Knuth was not a designer of Unix, and he is still alive.

Also, Linux is not Unix and was never intended to be Unix or follow its conventions.

The way Linux works now seems sane. You might very well have seen a change in the way Linux works. But when you've seen it change, multiple times, and each time 50% of what you know has to be tossed out and relearned, it gets tiresome. At times it just seems like it's change just for change's sake.

I want to have fun with the computer, not run madly just to stay in place like the Red Queen. Remember to re-read your own comment 30 years from now and see if you feel the same way.

It's a good question and infects all of our software "sacred cows."

The underlying thing is that we keep driving ourselves to "forward progress" in the sense of a collaborative hegemony, and only in those terms. Either a business wants to own the platform, or the developer wants to build that platform. To do that they have to achieve buy-in from existing stakeholders, but simultaneously reinvent incompatible things. Thus through repeated application of this approach the world of professional software development has aggregated itself into conformance to standards that barely make sense, are poorly specified, and have limited proof of concept, but tick whatever buzzword boxes are relevant to the immediate climate.

If you want to take a real stand, invest yourself in "dead" technologies. Then you can choose whatever you want, and if other people want to follow you on it it's implicit that they are working on a similar problem, and not trying to play the platforms game(else they would be looking for an angle to "modernize")

Healthy skepticism is necessary for any technologist. However, you do have to use it in both directions. I know my biases are that I prefer new technology to old. So I pay attention to that. However, it is just as bad to reflexively consign something as premature or ill-considered. Sometimes the collective hegemony gets it right. They may have missed on microservices but they didn't miss on the cloud really. I do try to be eclectic in my technology choices if only for cognitive reasons.

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