[TUHS] Systematic approach to command-line interfaces

Jon Steinhart jon at fourwinds.com
Tue Aug 3 11:49:17 AEST 2021


Bakul Shah writes:
> Or perhaps the issue is not having graphics/GUI designers with the
> creativity and sensibilities of the early Bell Labs crowd of researchers?
> I keep thinking there ought to be something simpler/more elegant than
> the current graphics subsystems....
>
> > On Aug 2, 2021, at 11:16 AM, Adam Thornton <athornton at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > It's a measure of Unix having been wounded by its own success.
> > 
> > fork() is a great model for a single-threaded text processing pipeline to
> do automated typesetting.  (More generally, anything that is a straightforward
> composition of filter/transform stages.)  Which is, y'know, what Unix is *for*.
> > 
> > It's not so great for a responsive GUI in front of a multi-function interactive program.
> > 
> > These days, the vast majority of Unix applications are "stuff people play with on their phones."
> > 
> > Adam

I thought that I posted something about this recently when someone
was arguing for threads being unnecessary and bad.

My two cents is that GUIs were the big driver for threads.  I would
personally like to get rid of them as they're "the same but different"
with regards to processes.  My preference would be to solve the
heaviness of processes problem.  I'm not in the thick of that these
days, but I don't see it being solved in software alone; it's going
to take some serious hardware/software architecture work.  Might be
easier to accomplish now that the world has pretty much settled on
the process model.

Jon


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