X: The First Fully Modular Software Disaster
Ah, this is entertaining to contrast with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15031814 "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).And in many ways they're not wrong:- "X has defeated us by switching the meaning of client and server"- "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.- 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.- client/server division of labour is still being fought over on the web- X authentication is painful to do with the original mechanism, but was eventually fixed by ssh X forwarding- Xdefaults is a great mystery, largely obsoleted by the GNOME people with their own mysterious pseudo-registries and, god help you, polkit- X still has trouble with the wide variety of graphics hardware out there, although you can usually get 2 monitors working eventually.- "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.