Reads like it came straight out of the UNIX-HATERS Handbook, nice. (For those unfamiliar: https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf)
Yes, it did some things right, but also did plenty of them bad, lets not worship it as the epitome of OS design, cloning it all the time without critical thinking.
Alone the fact that its creators went on to design Plan 9, Inferno, Alef, Limbo and Go, shows even they moved on to better approaches.
Also to note that outside FOSS circles worshiping UNIX, no one cares about said philosophy, including commercial UNIX vendors.
I have read and re-read it. I would, coldly and seriously, say that significantly less than 50% of it is obsolete.
Yes, some parts definitely are. Many of the specific technical details that are attacked are.
But the architectural points, the design points, the usability issues -- those mostly remain entirely valid.
I've started out on dos, then went from win3.11 to XP/7 and switched to Linux fully when 8 came out. They all suck in their own ways, but nowadays I just prefer Linux because it has become "it just works" for me. Mostly. Because while there is the occasional technical issue with some software or hardware, I personally just prefer the technical problems of Linux over the bullshit problems over on windows. Edge jumping in your face, the "office key", updates interrupting when you don't want them, ads in my start menu, telemetry, major UI changes between versions that seem half-baked and take a decade to be completed,...)
But I disagree with:
> The usability issues are mostly "I'm used to X, so I don't like Y".
I think that's true of some of them, but the usability issues of Unix and C are real, its programmer focus makes it worse for non-programmers, and its legendary lack of user friendliness hasn't changed over the decades -- it's just been wrapped in shiny GUIs.
Oh well, no arguing with that, but since I am one, yay? :)
I think you're confusing "different" with "better", and you're confusing someone'small almost personal experiments implemented as proof-of-concept projects as actually being improvements.
I mean, Plan 9 was designed with a radical push for distributed computing in mind. This is not "better" than UNIX's design goals, just different.
Nevertheless, Plan 9 failed to gain any traction and in practice was pronounced dead around a decade ago. In the meantime, UNIX and Unix-like OSes dominate the computing world still up to this day. How does that reflect in your "better approaches" assertion?
The argument on the Go programming language is particularly perplexing. The design goal of Go has nothing to do with the design goal of C. Their designers were very clear in how their design goals was to put together a high-level programming language and tech stack designed to improve Google's specific problems. This wasn't C's design requirements, were they?
> We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy.
Go is basically Limbo in a new clothing, Limbo took up the lessons on Alef's design failure.
They could have designed their C++ wannabe replacement in many other ways.
9front would like a word.
Come to that, R9 would too.
https://github.com/dancrossnyc/r9
If anyone were brave enough to grasp the nettle, I proposed a fairly simple doable set of changes that could make it more useful in this talk last year:
https://archive.fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3...