pjmlp

It has always been like that in computing, starting on school playground about which 8 bit home computer each kid had.

Now that is something I 100% agree with.

C got lint in 1979, and is incredible how much advocacy is still required for folks to use the tooling their compilers offer out of the box.

This problem isn't even C specific, other ecosystems suffer from similar adoption issues.

That is taken care by hypervisors.

Welcome to cloud computing, where software is cattle, not pets.

There isn't a Linux server taking care of a couple of services.

There are services deployed as Kubernetes pods, or serverless language runtimes across a cluster abstraction, running directly on top of type 1 hypervisors, or minimal kernel images enough to power distroless container images.

It has, a long time ago when doing serveless became fashionable, and too many realised they didn't want to manage Kubernetes clusters by hand.

So you get a type 1 hypervisor, which technically is like a micro kernel, which then boots whatever else on top including language runtimes, or chiseled containers.

Unikernels ideas aren't much different from some embedded deployment scenarios, with the application, language runtime and OS all linked together into the device firmware.

Naturally on desktop computing is another matter.

I thought the role model is how DHH does coding. /s

Programming languages and OS alternatives still missing from the list.

LLM driven programming is now mandatory at many companies, even more so at those that sell AI products.

Unfortunately they are there for compliance, unless there is a strong IT in place, which then again, makes them hated by everyone else.

Deterministic systems like tracing GCs, JIT compilers, PGO data, machine learning optimising passes that vary their output, depending on program behaviours?

I still cannot be bothered, even after reading this article.

I would vouch they are already here for some of us, and they are easy actually.

Type 1 hypervisors running language runtimes on top, for serverless computing, aren't much different from the unikernels vision.

In a type 1 hypervisor running a JVM on top, you would use Java Flight Recorder.

The tools exist, and in a container world no one should be running those tools directly anyway, it is all about rootless immutable containers, ideally without OS layers for deployment.

If the customer is willing to pay for that, yeah.

Spend project budget delivering features, or supporting in house custom implementation because the product SDK isn't being used for delivery.

Sure, but then it is up to you to support, not create support tickets when it borks in production.

You do projects using low code, no code platforms like Workato, Boomi,....

Where execution diagrams and integrations are now replaced by agents and prompts.

Tools integrations exist, but even those can be done with prompting.

At least on the world of enterprise consulting with SaaS products, the reality is already quite grimm.

SaaS SDKs that only support Next.js, for example,

https://www.contentful.com/developers/docs/tutorials/preview...

Yes, since the whole app router and React Server Components it feels like Perl's magic strings.

Maybe these folks have rediscovered some mod_perl books.

Same here.

Of course they were, even NeXTSTEP was designed to be compatible with UNIX only to compete with UNIX workstations like those from Sun.

Neither Apple nor NeXT had a UNIX culture, and efforts like A/UX and mkLinux were never that much serious.

Had they acquired Be, BeOS was even less UNIXy than NeXTSTEP.

Game and app developers certainly not.

The problem is that being a developer is not a synonymous with UNIX.

I bet you are located in US.

It is still there.

For those that don't know how to use a filter drop down, check UNIX 03 version.

Well he and others moved away from UNIX, created Plan 9 and Inferno.

In these efforts they also tried to create successor languages to C, Alef and Limbo (for userspace), and never cared that much about anything past C89.

He has settled with Linux because that is the winner of UNIX wars, which predated Linux wars on Distrowatch.

As for the original UNIX,

"Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy"

-- Rob Pike

And?

Yeah, it only applies when it is convenient.

I can provide other examples of real work done on Windows, like Photoshop, DAW, and so on.

Maybe those are interesting as teenager hobbies as well.

Not even UNIX System V userspace obeys a mythical rule that only exists on a worshiped book by the FOSS community, most of which never used anything besides GNU/Linux.

Worse is better, isn't that the UNIX motto?