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Comment by ponyous | Hacker News Reader

I listened to a conference talk[0] where Dylan talks about fresh framework and he says quoting: "We have this little project at Deno ... it's not a web framework that we're really promoting or you know intending to utilise long term. More of kind of a demo of what this post unix web frameworks might look like"

Is it worth investing in this now? It really put me off.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBcFJmQ6UVM at 15:50

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Fresh has had a lot of development since then. See the "Production Ready" section in blog post for the latest thoughts:

> Fresh 1.0 is a stable release and can be relied upon for production use. Much of Deno's public web services use Fresh (for example the site you are reading this blog post on now!). This does not mean we are done with Fresh. We have many more ideas to improve user and developer experience.

I interpreted this as politeness given that it’s the inaugural conference of Remix, a direct competitor in the space.

“Post Unix”?

well many of us think that the excellent ideas of computing in the 1970s (those that produced Unix) are no longer the best ways to do things, and believe that the community should be innovating much more.

a lot of those innovations are over 50 years old, now. do we REALLY believe that the Unix Philosophy is the best thing in the history of computing? past and future? really? I don't. and what about in another 50 years? how about 1000 years? at some point, many much better ideas will emerge.

that's what "post-Unix" means. the things that come after this Unix thing we're hung up on.

Massive eyeroll

thanks. you gonna contribute or just type out textual reactions?

Why? Or are you one of those "Unix was born perfect and no further progress is possible" types?

This argument is fuzzy. Your goal shouldn't be replacement just because it's old, but rather, because you actually have a more efficient or easy to understand approach.

As far as I can tell, there's a marketing term ("post-unix") but not any concrete ideas backing it. The Ryan Dahl post linked above is equally fuzzy as it seems to just be saying "use an encapsulated runtime for scripting that replaces existing Unix-level dependencies with Web Assembly code that runs on top of Unix."

Not to be rude but it really just doesn't make a lot of sense. Is there a blog post or video explaining the general thesis here?

it means simply that there is always something better, waiting to be discovered, and that we should not let ourselves become acclimated to inferior things simply because we've used those things a lot, and know them.

there is always something to improve. find it. improve it.

still fuzzy?

it is our moral obligation to improve ourselves and the world around us.

I don't know how much clearer I can be.

I agree in general that yes, you should be seeking improvements but is there a specific improvement tied to this term (post-unix)? The term itself implies that there is a concrete idea or set of ideas it involves.

You're over-thinking things. Post-unix clearly just means "something more modern than 70s Unix design". I don't think anyone ever tries to make something newer but not better so that's never a goal.

I'm not over-thinking, I'm asking for a clear definition of what that means. The original comment that kicked off this thread said "what is post unix."

There is a clear-ish definition (not running JavaScript in a Linux container like Docker but running it directly on top of the OS in its own containerized runtime) explained in the linked video that comment was replying to, but no, it's not just "something more modern than 70s Unix design."

https://tinyclouds.org/javascript_containers

The way people use modern Linux systems is moving past how most people used Unix systems back in the day. Instead of piles of shell scripts glued together we now use a monolith (systemd) to manage most of the low level services and initialization. No one really cares or tries to setup proper multi-user systems and instead we focus on multiple roots with each application given an exclusive root filesystem, view of the system, etc. (i.e. containerized). Computing is a lot different than it was 50 years ago, and that's not a bad thing.

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