Comment by kjetil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kjetil | Hacker News Reader

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With love to all the UNIX apologists in this thread: you're missing the point.

Why isn't software easier to install and configure? Why are we still using relics from the 70s as the base of our systems? Why are we so focused on mastering the tools of the past instead of creating new tools for the future?

I'm a long time Linux and BSD user. I sit in a shell for hours every day. And I still can't believe why we put up with this crap.

Shell scripts and one-liners. Ls and cat and grep and uniq and sed and awk and tar and loads of other low-level tools that you haphazardly string together. For the love of all that is holy, just use a real programming language!

With the powerful computers of today, we still interface to other computers through a text-based bottleneck that's basically from the stone age. What's up with that?

OK, this turned out to be a little rant. Don't take it the wrong way; I love UNIX, but I also hate all the cruft that just seems to accumulate and never gets cleaned up. I think we could do a lot better.

> Why isn't software easier to install and configure?

Because nearly always, one size does not fit all. Those four thousand config options are there because at some point, someone needed each of them. Software is complex - a one-click install-and-run is fine for consumer apps built for known hardware running in tightly controlled environments, but once you get out of that sandbox, there's a lot to account for.

We're using "relics", but they're relics that have been battle-tested and continuously improved over the years. We use them because they work. Where redundancy is found, it's often wrapped up into abstractions (see: Makefiles, package managers) that enable operation at a higher level. I think it's myopic to look at computing and accuse it of being some archaic system that has remained untouched for 40 years.

> I think we could do a lot better.

I wholeheartedly welcome your impending attempt.

> With love to all the UNIX apologists in this thread: you're missing the point.

We didn't miss the point. We just don't agree with it. We use text-based systems where we assemble small things into the tools we need because one shot do-exactly-what-I-need items are impossible to anticipate.

We know these needs cannot be anticipated. Instead of trying and failing, we do one better. We create an array of tools that can be assembled into the ones we need at any given moment. The result is the power and expressiveness to be flexible and suit the needs of the moment.

Imagine if your car could only ever go to places the manufacturer cared about when it was made. Probably not what you want.

> I think we could do a lot better.

We await your thoughts with bated breath.

shell is a programming language. You are interactively programming and in a more efficient way too. You are telling the computer to do things for you (instead of clicking on pictures) or speaking in more verbose language.

So I don't really get your objection. Even if you programmed what you wanted computer to do in some other "real" language you would be doing exactly the same thing only in different syntax. And source code would still be even bigger bottleneck :D. Try writing python script to wget a file and extract it to local file system. I think you will find it's more time consuming :D.

A linguistics professor I was speaking with once put it (paraphrasing from memory): "With a shell, you have all the expressibility of a language. With pointy-clicky, you're reduced to pointing at things and grunting."

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