A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
This passage at the end was the most thought-provoking for me:<p>&gt; Unix and C however form a powerful deterrent to the average astronomer to write her or his own code (and the average astronomer&#x27;s C is much, much worse than his Fortran used to be). The powers-that-be in the software world of course have always felt that &quot;ordinary&quot; users (astronomers in this case) should be using software and not writing it. The cynic might feel that since those same powers nearly all make their living by writing software, and get even more pay when they manage other programmers, then they have a vested interest in bringing about a state of affairs where the rest of us are reduced to mere supplicants, dependent on them for all our software needs. It is clear that Unix does not pose an insuperable barrier --- the ever-expanding armies of hackers out there are evidence enough that the barrier can be scaled given enough time and enthusiasm for the task. But hacking is not astronomy, and hackers are not astronomers, and it is astronomy and astronomers I worry about. We shouldn&#x27;t have to scale the Unix barrier, and it is all the sadder because, since the advent of a VMS-based Starlink, ordinary astronomers have had something denied to most other scientists in this country --- readily accessible, reliable, user-friendly computing power that can be easily harnessed to a particular astronomical requirement.<p>I&#x27;ve spent the past hour or so figuring out what I think about this. It&#x27;s easy to dismiss this piece of rhetoric as flawed reasoning or as irrelevant today. For example, I&#x27;m not sure if Unix was ever to blame for the self-serving user-developer dichotomy discussed in that quote above. After all, the Unix philosophy is all about small tools tied together with scripting, not the mega-packages mentioned in the article. And was there really not a good Fortran option for Unix in 1994? Or was Starlink (or its Unix-based successor) just too cheap to buy whatever good Unix Fortran implementation might have existed back then?<p>But the software development priesthood is still a problem; I&#x27;d say it&#x27;s worse today. It&#x27;s what worries me the most about the future of computing for the next generation, including my nieces and nephew. Will they be able to help shape the software that runs so much of their lives if they can&#x27;t land a job at a handful of tech behemoths? Much of that software is even built on a foundation of Unix and more generally open source, but the power of that foundation isn&#x27;t available to the end-users.<p>However, the free software movement&#x27;s answers to these problems are hampered by their own elitism, which is in fact largely a continuation of the Unix elitism this article bemoans. It&#x27;s true that we have much better languages than C, there are usable GUI desktop environments for free Unixes, and there are even whole open-source integrated development environments that one can run on a free Unix. But at some point one still comes in contact with the same arcane, haphazardly designed command-line environment that this article and the UNIX-HATERS Handbook rightly ridicule.<p>So if we actually want a system that&#x27;s both free and open from top to bottom, and actually approachable to most people, then maybe we need to finally let go of Unix, or treat it as only an expedient substrate as Apple and Google do. Or as another writer put it, we need to free our technical aesthetic from the 1970s [1].<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;prog21.dadgum.com&#x2F;74.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;prog21.dadgum.com&#x2F;74.html</a><p>Disclosure: I happen to currently work for Microsoft, on the Windows accessibility team. But these opinions are entirely my own, written on my own initiative. And yes, the fact that I benefit somewhat from the user-developer dichotomy enforced by the likes of my employer makes me feel uncomfortable. But I&#x27;m not sure quitting would actually help anything.