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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

From page 18:

  - But it [Unix] lacked an active data model
    - Farber suggested this in 1978 and we all thought it made no sense
    - He was right, as usual

Does anyone know what this refers to?

Any articles on it I could read?

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Absence of a built-in simple database model, I think. The unix way is to use a flat file, which turned out in the long term to be inadequate. Part of the underlying reason for systemd on Linux is that people want to configure their system with a robust database, not shell scripts or ad-hoc text file formats which must be edited by hand, or by custom database drivers (like Berkeley DB). Proplist might be another partial solution to this requirement on systems which lack an active data model. BeOS had a strong database-like file system which may address the same thing.

See http://martinfowler.com/articles/languageWorkbench.html#Acti...

Had the same exact reaction. Wikipedia surprised me.

But no, I didn't add a page for him ...

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