[TUHS] [tuhs] The Unix shell: a 50-year view

[Tomasz Rola]

On Sat, Jul 03, 2021 at 09:20:57AM -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
[...]
> Much of Unix's early evolution and thus architecture and philosophy, came
> from addressing a set of problems that people had in a historical context
> that, one could argue, aren't that relevant anymore.

I mostly agree with you, but I think certain things should be
expressed more explicitly, even if I do not want to be picky. So, I
see the claim of Unix not being relevant anymore might be interpreted
in two ways, and both are not (quite) true. 

First, if it means "for all people it is not relevant anymore", such
thing never happened IMHO. For this, all those folks would need to
consider Unix as a tool for their problems and decide that it was
obsolete. But, most of humans were never so much interested in
computers to know about "some yooo-neex" and this state of things
lasts to these days. If they use computer (cellphone), it is most
probably because now the devices enable dating and other forms of
entertainment. Some of them even heard about "Leah nukes".

Another way of understanding your statement is "there was a group of
folks for whom Unix was relevant and lost its appeal". This, again,
not true. The group itself may have lost members and gained members,
but I believe it is more or less same size. Maybe even bigger than it
was, and ability to have anything "unix-like" for free (as in
"voluntary donation") plays huge role here.

> A hierarchical filesystem in a global namespace, pipelines
> facilitating chaining of filters for interactive use, a simple but
> weak permissions model, unstructured text as a universal interchange
> format, terminal-oriented text editors.... All of these were fine on
> shared multiuser interactive machines, but do they matter as much
> now?

Depends. In a land of the blind a one-eye should be very careful,
because he would not be a king. I certainly would not like to be
endlessly asked for help with installing Linux. I think majority of
computer users do not care, will not care, that they have some files
on their machines or even that what they have are the machines. So,
they might not appreciate your knowledge about such things. Perhaps it
is a good thing?

[...]
> Perhaps I've mentioned this story before: a former colleague at Google was
> writing a shell script to figure something out. It wasn't working. Really,
> what he wanted was basically a `grep -q` and an `if` statement, but he'd
> written a complicated mess with shell functions that tried to "return" the
> exit status of the processes they ran: his shell script was written more
> like a Python program. I rewrote it for him in half-a-dozen or so lines
> (down from 30 or 40) and talked about Unix for a minute, the philosophy,
> etc. At the end of my monologue extolling the virtues of our style of
> computing, he looked at me blankly and said something along the lines of,
> "yeah. I think that time has passed and people just don't conceptualize
> problems that way anymore."

I think what he really meant (knowlingly or not) was "the money walks
somewhere else". As far as I can say, the kids are just following
money. This kind of behaviour is called a tropism. Since this is how
the world goes, I am not sure it can be described as bad or good. This
is very much like evolution, thanks to which we are living in and are
the result of living in, a huge slaughterhouse. The 30cm long
centipede hunts bats which evolved long after centipede and long after
insects were dominant life forms on a planet. /bin/sh will be used to
solve problems in a future, too. Innumerable Unix servers will be sent
to the landfill. systemd will grow a hairy-sticky ecosystem of its
own, developing pseudo-kernels like pseudo-brains in dinosaur belly.

-- 
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **