W-what?
What motivates you?
Justin Gray
Jack Campbell
Are you one of these faggots who think macOS is Unix because of that funny cert?
Cooper Young
Don't wait for motivation, just start working on something first thing in the morning.
Jordan Walker
During work?
Joseph Cruz
The need to find new ways to be lazy.
Jeremiah Sullivan
I think that there is mainly one person who is posting all this
anti-unix stuff. And maybe about three other newfags that crudely
repeat his ideas. These people never seem to offer an alternative
to unix. Maybe they are actually suggesting that we don't use any
computers at all?
Unix has its problems, just like everything else. But so far I can't
find any other OS that I would rather use. Some strong features of
unix are:
1) Text interface - graphics are good for some things, but will
never be a full replacement for text.
2) Shell and pipes - being able to route data from program to program
allows you to format and process data in any way that you need or
want to. If this doesn't seem important to you then you probably
don't know how to actually use a computer.
3) Modularity - the design philosophy behind unix makes the best
sense. Anybody who deals with complex systems or ideas will probably
agree that breaking a problem down into small and simple elements
is the best approach.
I can't find these features in another OS. So I will probably
continue to use unix. What I would really like would be something
very bare bones, like CP/M, with the features of unix that I really
like.
Eli Powell
This guy gets it.
Unix is not perfect, but Unix and its derivatives are the best we have right now.
Isaiah Allen
I never pretended to be more than one person.
UNIX is extremely bloated and buggy but we shouldn't give up using computers just because some AT&T employees weren't good programmers. Lisp machines show that you can have a higher quality OS and better programming environment with much less code. Software can be faster, smaller, more reliable, and simpler than it is now and do more at the same time.
The number of problems in UNIX is much higher compared to other operating systems. UNIX commands are so inconsistent they look like they came from different OSes.
That's because of the PDP-11 hardware. Most computers in the early 70s used a text interface.
2) Shell and pipes
Pipes are virtual PDP-11 tape drives which are based around moving groups of single bytes at a time and seeking to different portions of the tape. This is another example of how UNIX makes things less efficient, less secure, more prone to errors and vulnerabilities, more bloated, and worse for users, all at the same time, like having to serialize and parse JSON or XML instead of sharing the data like on Lisp machines and Multics.
3) Modularity
UNIX is less modular than other operating systems. UNIX weenies like to point to the "tools" as if having to start separate programs to "cut" and "grep" is better than being able to use a single language for text processing (like Perl, Python, or Lisp). Marketers were able to turn a workaround for the shell sucking at text processing into a "philosophy." UNIX doesn't help to make newer programs modular since they're not based on sequential tape processing.
The design of UNIX tools is based on low-level byte at a time bullshit instead of what you want to do with data. That's one reason XML and JSON are so popular, because they let programs interpret data on a higher level than individual bytes. When I break a problem down, I want to do it in the way that's best for the problem at hand, not in some artificial way forced by the OS because it wants me to pretend I'm writing to a PDP-11 tape.
That would be a better choice than UNIX.
Intel x86 is "the best we have right now" too, but it sucks. AMD64 killed the best parts of x86, Intel ME is a nightmare, and there are all these exploits coming out.
loper-os.org
>My standard of comparison for any technology will always be everything previously achieved by mankind, rather than what is available on the market today.
Hmm. I used to think the strength of lisp machine toolscame from the fact that the developers actually used themregularly in their work and depended on them in order todevelop everything they were going to need in the nextgeneration system. That is, I though that there was acausal link between using your own tools and making thembetter. But maybe it's not whether you use your own tools thatmakes them good, but rather that the goodness or badness ofyour tools is just magnified over time by continuing to usethem. That would explain a lot of things about Unix...
Connor Cook
Are you even more retarded than what I thought?
Gabriel Roberts
You're right. Tapes support seeking and pipes don't, so they're not quite virtual tape drives even though they're based on tapes. There was an attempt to add seeking to Linux pipes, but they couldn't do it because of fork.
stackoverflow.com
lkml.iu.edu
However, Chris Siebenmann pointed out that a filedescriptor can be passed to other processes withfork() or domain sockets -- thus the writer side ofthe pipe would have to support multiple readers withdistinct positions. Which is a lot hairer than theinterface I outlined earlier.
That's a great example of how "anyone promoting an improved version of anything runs smack into insuperable compatibility problems" and more evidence that UNIX isn't simple and modular.
> What I can't figure out is why there isn't a giant market> for improved unix software. For example, it seems like it> would be straightforward to write a decent C macro> processor or garbage collector, and that you could make a> bundle of money selling them because everyone would want> them. But no one does this. Why not? Maybe it's because> weenies are so used to not fighting city hall that they> can't believe things could ever be better?> You really can't figure this out? It's because everytool depends for its operation on the bugs in every othertool, to exaggerate slightly. Thus anyone promoting animproved version of anything runs smack into insuperablecompatibility problems. You have to work as hard asStallman to make any headway at all.