X: The First Fully Modular Software Disaster
Ah, this is entertaining to contrast with <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15031814" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15031814</a> "Why did software go off the rails". The "UNIX haters handbook" is extremely old, as if you couldn't tell from the references to Reagan and the 50-MIPS workstation (roughly equivalent to a $1 Cortex-M0 in today's money).<p>And in many ways they're not wrong:<p>- "X has defeated us by switching the meaning of client and server"<p>- "most computers running X run just four programs: xterm, xload, xclock, and a window manager" : the intervening 20 years have added a web browser. Almost all software run by the user is in either the xterm or the browser.<p>- ICCCM is hilariously complicated, although cut-and-paste largely works now. It's just that there are two different cut-and-paste mechanisms in play.<p>- client/server division of labour is <i>still</i> being fought over on the web<p>- X authentication is painful to do with the original mechanism, but was eventually fixed by ssh X forwarding<p>- Xdefaults is a great mystery, largely obsoleted by the GNOME people with their own mysterious pseudo-registries and, god help you, polkit<p>- X still has trouble with the wide variety of graphics hardware out there, although you can usually get 2 monitors working eventually.<p>- "NeWS an d NEXTSTEP were political failures because they suffer from the same two problems: oBNoXiOuS capitalization, and Amiga Persecution Attitude(TM)." : basically true, until they dropped the attitude and capitals and became Cocoa.