> Those who don't understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
What a low value and needlessly dismissive comment. And based on HN's track record it probably means Arcan actually has a shot.
What a low value and needlessly dismissive comment. And based on HN's track record it probably means Arcan actually has a shot.
It's from The Art of Unix Programming (2003) by Eric S. Raymond. It's actually in the first chapter. And the supposedly original quote is:
> Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
> -- Henry Spencer Usenet signature, November 1987
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/philosophychapt...
Henry Spencer being: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Spencer . I imagine that's why the quote is also in that regexp book.
It's a super arrogant quote used, I'd say, 95% of the time by people who don't deeply know other OSes (besides shallow memes and jokes about them).
The fact that the overwhelming majority of great applications, services, any kind of software we create is not written in Lisp should at some point in the first century after the creation of Lisp, lead Lisp afficionados to some kind of enlightenment, one would hope.
Unlikely, since it's already been 60 years, so they only have 40 years left.
No, CL's popularity hasn't changed over the past 30 years.
Looks like Burke lived a century+ earlier.
I think the point here is that DOS explicitly rejects the composition that pipes enable, in exchange for the ability to just hand "the whole system" over to a programmer.
But the main point, that DOS was basically a thin program loader that "got out of the way" is sound. Think of it like a UEFI shell environment, with 640k+ limits.
There's been a few attempts at this, but I settled on the fish shell as it has a good balance and syntax highlighting for interactivity.
I still write simple scripts in sh and complex ones in Python however.