The Elements of Style: Unix as Literature | Hacker News Reader

The Elements of Style: Unix as Literature

theody.net

There's definitely an elitist undercurrent. But that is just the endpoint of working with a system that actually is better.

I discovered UNIX back in 1990. By 1991 I was working with a full-featured GUI. Around 1993 I thought I should take a look at this new-fangled 'Windows' that everybody on the Internet was raving about. I couldn't believe how horribly primitive it was. Windows didn't become usable, IMHO, until Windows 95, so by then it was a full four years at least behind the half-dozen or so UNIX desktops that were based on X11. (And even then, it wasn't a true pre-emptive multi-tasking OS.)

Windows in 2020 still hasn't caught up with the network-based X11 that can easily run a program on a machine in Britain and have it launched, controlled and displayed on a desktop in New Zealand.

https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-06-24

> Windows in 2020 still hasn't caught up with the network-based X11 that can easily run a program on a machine in Britain and have it launched, controlled and displayed on a desktop in New Zealand.

Windows has RDP support, which is strictly better than X11 forwarding because it allows for seamless operation of many multimedia-oriented features that would be expected from modern desktop sessions on any OS. I remember it supporting printer, drive, sound and USB forwarding, all of which aren't possible with plain X11 without filling in the gaps yourself.

The de-facto standard solutions from third party suppliers like TeamViewer are also a significant alternative for cross-platform usage.

You can achieve something like X11 application forwarding with RDP on Windows Server, just not quite as snappy: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-server...

"The one-size-fits-all, point-and-click, we've-already-anticipated-all-your-needs world of NT had me yearning for those obscure command-line flags and man -k. ... Mastery of UNIX, like mastery of language, offers real freedom."

The thing is, they have not anticipated all my needs. Instead they have, through the GUI, limited what I can do. Inevitably this becomes a business objective, to limit what the user does, in order to further the company's interests, instead of the user's.

If mastery of UNIX (CLI) offers real freedom, then what does mastery of Windows (GUIs) offer.

Employment perhaps. In any case, something less than real freedom.

Great read. One interesting thing about the word/image dichotomy the author mentions is that for *nix fans, it also seems like the text has an aesthetic value as an image in and of itself. If you look at Reddit's unixporn board [1], for example, almost every post prominently shows open terminals as part of the visual "cool."

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/

as a lib arts major, this speaks to me. I think the biggest thing that's helped me in my career is simply being exposed to things besides computing fundamentals.

How, if I may ask?

1. learning. I notice that people who have the fancy degrees or come from big tech are more interested in status/ladder climbing rather than the "work of the work". new things are dangerous to the status quo. 2. reading comprehension. they don't read the docs, their tests read like 'it works' if there's any. 3. tedious or technical work isn't "cool". the reality is, learning the obscure hard parts of the existing system and making recommendations to upgrade out or up is job security. they would rather start a weekly tech talk.

Powershell has entered the chat.

Is there still anybody not using it ?

Bash forever!

It hurts to say, but powershell could put bash in the ground. Bash is obviously more useful on unix systems, but if powershell had more Linux support I'm afraid I'd be sorely tempted.

I'm speaking as a non-user of powershell here, but I recently heard that you can't do text redirection. Is this true? Is there another workflow that makes it not matter?

Where did you get that idea from? It can do text, as well as various objects.

Perhaps I called it the wrong thing, but the simple > and < actions are what it was about, I believe. The friend complaining remarked that cmd could do what they wanted, but not powershell. This person is used to bash on unix-like systems.

It absolutely can do text redirection, but also lots of other stuff. I'm more into functional programming in general, but the object-oriented stuff in Powershell is really well suited for the use case. Honestly in a lot of ways Powershell just solves shell scripting, almost any task can be accomplished by stringing a handful of separate modules together, just like bash is supposed to be.

Yes, it's true, but it's not the first time people choose inferior technology. Just look at windows :)))))

I am kidding of course.

Quite a few people, I imagine. For one, Powershell on Windows is a slower interactive experience than CMD.

That, and some windows-heavy projects still have a large amount of Batch files.

That being said, I'm super glad to have access to it when I'm stuck on Windows for deploys or the like.

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