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Comment by tokyobreakfast | Hacker News Reader

I miss Motif. This is a portal to a time when men were men and UNIX(R)—or in this case, VMS—desktops were utilitarian and did exactly what you needed and nothing more.

Now we live in a time where we allocate GBs of RAM to eye candy that functionally accomplishes nothing. Then we make the case to rewrite the eye candy in increasingly "safe" languages, requiring even more RAM.

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Safe languages have nothing to do with it, case in point, the choice of programming languages available on VMS.

Which contrary to UNIX did not had the C mistake.

Rather Structured BASIC, Extended Pascal, COBOL, Modula-2, Fortran and Bliss.

It is really sloppy programming nowadays, regardless of the languages.

Hm? VMS also had K&R C, and a simulator I worked with at the time was written (not by me) using that compiler.

Indeed, although C kind of felt second-class on VMS since the language has a lot of Unixisms embedded in the standard library and, to a lesser extent, the language itself.

Being able to define command line interfaces using cld files on VMS was really wonderful and you got things like abbreviations of options (and commands) to their shortest unique initial string was quite nice (so, for example, the directory command could be named as such but everybody just typed dir).

Much of VMS was eventually rewritten in C to accomodate the Alpha.

By then it was OpenVMS.

Very familiar with it. Ran it in production for a major gambling company in my country for years. The stability was okay (no better than say Solaris) but the ergonomics for administrators and developers was absolutely horrid.

The Alpha though? It's a shame DEC couldn't push it hard enough to prevent x86_64 from happening.

Eventually, but it wasn't first class, rather to port UNIX software into VMS.

Just like MS-DOS had plenty of C compilers to chose from, while it was actually written in Assembly, and most folks were programming in Turbo and Quick Pascal, Turbo and Quick BASIC, Clipper,...

Hardly the same kind of C for everything like on UNIX.

Unix software like X11 and Motif…

Yes, they were even available MS-DOS via Coherent, but not the main way to develop software on the platform.

That a lot of software wasn't written in C on VMS is beside the point, the fact is that a totally normal K&R C was available on VMS, just the same as e.g. Pascal was available. And the C compiler was popular among people writing TCP/IP software (and I don't mean re-compiling some Unix ftp client), where they could just sit down with Steven's book and code.

- Typo: I meant to write "Stevens' book"

On the contrary, that is indeed the point, safe languages have been a thing already before UNIX/C took off, and even the reason why Multics had a higer security score than UNIX, thanks to PL/I.

> Then we make the case to rewrite the eye candy in increasingly "safe" languages, requiring even more RAM.

"did exactly what you needed and nothing more" You can still do that. Build a config for openbox or dwm. While the wm still compiles you can ignore the fads.

You can use a CDE lookalike https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE

The real thing is open source since 2012 https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/

Time to port this to Wayland using Claude code, right?

points finger you son of a bitch, I'm in.

> Now we live in a time where we allocate GBs of RAM to eye candy that functionally accomplishes nothing.

Well, of course it takes more ram when we run 4x the pixels for the same size screen. And we double the refresh rate, but then hold everything back a frame to composite it. :P

I think the one frame delay is due to X11 clients rendering a frame, then the X compositor rendering a frame, both according to the usual timing rules. With Wayland, it should be easier for client and compositor to render in the same frame interval because the compositor properly controls frame timing. It can just tell clients to render slightly early, then use the remaining few milliseconds for compositing.

The Motif default theme was quite handsome, and the "demo" Motif Window Manager worked pretty well, but Motif was something of a nightmare to work with

The API sucks real bad, and even at the height of Motif popularity, the package itself was riddled with bugs because proprietary UNIX vendors never updated that shit

Motif was super-obviously designed by C++ programmers who could not ship a C++ library for technical reasons. So they tried to do a C++ API in C. And it hurts like a pineapple thrust into the wrong orifice, leafy-part-first.

Not really, because it wasn't a thing when Motif took off.

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