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Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

I'm aware it used to be that way, but it's long been fixed

It's fine to hate Unix, but you should update your examples :)

It has been fixed on Linux distributions, which aren't UNIX.

And even that, only bash, because I wouldn't consider the state of X Windows and Wayland fixed in any way, shape, or form.

UNIX is dead, no one cares anymore. It's just Linux now. Your examples and complaints are both outdated and not in good faith.

For all the weirdos smashing that downvote button: How about you name me some UNIX distros you have ran in the past year? Other than Linux, OpenBSD (~0.1% market share btw) and ostensibly MacOS (which we all know has dropped any pretense of caring to be UNIX-like many years ago), that is.

macOS is literally certified Unix.

Sure, but it's not actually. Everyone knows that everything you do for macos needs macos specific exceptions.

Yes, because apps are written for Linux first, and Linux isn't Unix.

sem_init would like a word

It doesn't get one, on account of not being a mandatory part of SUS.

keep moving that goalpost

Obviously and obliviously spoken by someone who never used a Real Unix System back in the day that EVERY Unix system needed MANY specific exceptions.

We're talking about the current day

You have no idea what we're talking about. Are you not even old enough to have seen Jurassic Park?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOeY07qKU9c

macOS is absolutely Unix, and a lot more like mainstream Unix than many of the other vastly different Unix systems of the past and present, so exactly when did the definition of Unix suddenly tighten up so much that it somehow excludes macOS? And how does your arbitrary gatekeeping and delusional denial of the ubiquity and popularity of macOS, and ignorance of the Unix 03 certification, the embedded, real time, and automotive space, and many other Unix operating systems you've never heard of or used, suddenly change the actual definition of Unix that the rest of the world uses?

Have you ever even attended or presented at a Usenix conference? Or worked for a company like UniPress who ports cross platform software to many extremely different Unix systems? Maybe then you'd be more qualified to singlehandedly change the definition of the word, and erase Unix 03 certification from existence, and shut down all the computers and devices running it, but you're not. Who do you think you are, one of Musk's DOGE script kiddies? Because you sound as overconfident and factually incorrect as one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

>The "no true Scotsman" fallacy is committed when the arguer satisfies the following conditions:

>1) not publicly retreating from the initial, falsified a posteriori assertion: CHECK

>2) offering a modified assertion that definitionally excludes a targeted unwanted counterexample: DOUBLE CHECK

>3) using rhetoric to signal the modification: TRIPLE CHECK

macOS, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris (still technically certified), Inspur K-UX, EulerOS, etc.

POSIX-compliant and Unix-alike OSes (e.g., FreeBSD, QNX, etc.) are very active in many common domains (networking, firewalls, embedded, industrial).

Mission-critical infrastructure, telco, financial systems, military/spacecraft, automotive, and embedded still widely use non-Linux Unix or Unix-like systems.

QNX in cars, AIX in banks, Illumos in storage, RTEMS in space systems.

keep those ad hominems coming kiddo

have fun pretending anything you said still matters in 2025

You have no clue what you're talking about, you're completely incapable and afraid to respond to any of my points, and you've been just making shit up and throwing around random buzzwords you don't understand for quit some time now, incoherently unable to complete a sentence, like you're on ketamine. Nobody's falling for any of it. All you've done is make ad hominem attacks, no true scotsman defenses, move the goalposts, then hypocritically accuse other people of doing exactly what you just did: textbook psychological projection. Every single leaf of this argument is you unable to take the L, counter any the valid arguments other people have made, and implicitly admitting defeat that you can't defend anything you said or counter anything anyone else has.

macOS is certified Unix, widely used and extremely popular, and there's absolutely nothing you can do or say that will change that fact, and everyone knows it.

AIX and Solaris, Oxide uses Illumos, a Solaris fork.

Orbit OS on the PlayStation.

On embedded space, with various levels of POSIX compliancy without being Linux distributions, QNX, vxWorks, INTEGRITY, NuttX, FreeRTOS, Zephyr, RTEMS.

Thanks for proving my point

I'll update my examples when your examples of how it's been fixed don't use the same arcane syntax and semantics as the 48 year old Bourne shell. That's the whole point, which you're still missing.

> $ bash -c '[ $((1 + 1)) = 2 ]; echo $?'

Not even Perl uses that much arcane punctuation to test if 1 + 1 = 2. As if [] isn't enough, you've got to throw in two more levels of (()), plus enough grawlix profanity for a Popeye comic strip. And people complain Lisp has too many parens. Sheez.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grawlix

There's even an emoji for Unix shell syntax:

https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+1F92C

What are good shells in your opinion?

rc and 9front's philosophy. Unix, but better and removing all the cruft.

I prefer ITS DDT (aka HACTRN), with its built-in PDP-10 assembler and disassembler, that lets you do things like your login file customizing your prompt in assembly code to print the time by making system calls, without actually spawning any sub-jobs to merely print the time:

https://gunkies.org/wiki/ITS_DDT_Guide

  ..PROMPT
      holds the instruction which DDT uses to type out a "*".
      You can replace it with any other instruction.
      To use "%" instead of "*", deposit $1#%$> in that location
      ($> to avoid clobbering the opcode without having 
      to know what it is)

If you have to use arcane syntax and grawlix profanity, you should at least have direct efficient access to the full power of the CPU and operating system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incompatible_Timesharing_Syste...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_debugging_technique

https://web.archive.org/web/20061011004003/http://www.sigfs....

https://its.victor.se/wiki/luser

https://www.hactrn.net/sra/alice/alices.pdp10

https://gunkies.org/wiki/Incompatible_Timesharing_System

(I recognize that photo I took of MIT-MC at the MIT-AI Lab!)

https://gunkies.org/wiki/File:Mit-mc.jpg

Even the Apple ][ Integer Basic monitor ROMs had a build-in mini assembler and disassembler.

https://www.ldx.ca/notes/apple2-notes.html

I keep submitting PR’s to get my assembler extensions in Fish and ZSH but so far no avail. Ideally all scripting should be done in single-clock-cycle assembly statements.

I mean it makes write-only languages like Perl look like beautiful prose but it’s hard to argue about efficiently setting the 20 environment variables used by my terraform jobs with a mere 20 clock cycles. It may seem silly but every clock cycle truly matters.

it's not silly! <3

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