The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
Although I agree that Unix is a big collection of hacks and well past its prime, the author displays several fundamental misconceptions of what he&#x27;s talking about. Here&#x27;s a few examples:<p>- <i>Dirty hacks in UNIX started to arise when UNIX was released, and it was long before Windows came to the scene, I guess there wasn’t even Microsoft DOS at the time (I guess and I don’t bother to check, so check it yourself).</i> At least he acknowledges that he&#x27;s being incredibly lazy, and he shows the glimmer of an understanding as to why some of the things mentioned later happened: because Unix is from the early 70s, which were a very different time in computing &amp; culture.<p>- <i>Almost at the very beginning, there was no &#x2F;usr folder in UNIX. All binaries were located in &#x2F;bin and &#x2F;sbin.</i> &#x2F;usr was the place for user home directories (there was no &#x2F;home). Putting &#x2F;home on a separate partition remains a pretty common thing to this day because users will tend to have greater storage requirements than just the root. &#x2F;usr&#x2F;bin and the like are the result of people realizing that this secondary larger disk is an acceptable place to put binaries and other files that <i>aren&#x27;t</i> needed at bootup.<p>- <i>In other words, if you’ve captured Ctrl+C from the user’s input, then the operating system, instead of just calling your handler, will interrupt the syscall that was running before and return EINTR error code from the kernel.</i> That&#x27;s not the kind of interrupt they&#x27;re talking about.<p>- <i>I’ve read somewhere that the cp command is called cp not because of copy but because UNIX was developed with the use of terminals that output characters very slowly.</i> Yep, terminals that print on paper are pretty slow, as are 300 baud modems. I&#x27;m absolutely crushed I had to learn that &#x27;cp&#x27; means &#x27;copy&#x27;--it took hours to beat that into my head, and the thousands of keystrokes I&#x27;ve saved over the years are a small comfort (except to my rsi-crippled hands)<p>- <i>The names of UNIX utilities is another story. For example, grep comes from command g&#x2F;re&#x2F;p in the ed text editor. Well, cat comes from concatenation. I hope you already knew it. To top it all up, vmlinuz — gZipped LINUx with Virtual Memory support.</i> &#x27;cat&#x27; comes from &#x27;catenate&#x27;, in fact. What would you name &#x27;grep&#x27; instead? &quot;searchregexandprint&quot;?<p>- <i>at least the main website of C that would be the main entry point for all beginners and would contain not only documentation but also a brief manual on installing C tools on any platform, as well as a manual on creating a simple project in C, and would also contain a user-friendly list of C packages</i> This is one of the most ridiculous ones. You&#x27;re talking about a programming language defined in the 70s, for Christ&#x27;s sake. Lot of websites created in the 70s? There is a document with a good introduction to C, project examples, etc. and it&#x27;s call The C Programming Language, a book by K&amp;R. When Kernighan made another language a few years ago, yeah, he made a website for it--golang.org, it&#x27;s one of the best project sites I&#x27;ve seen.<p>The article points out some legit problems in Unix, but even leaving aside the author&#x27;s ESL challenges it&#x27;s poorly-written, poorly thought-out, and poorly-defended.