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

[Larry McVoy]

On Sun, Jul 04, 2021 at 02:47:57AM +0200, Tomasz Rola wrote:
> 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.

This is a response to Cross.  You are sort of right in that we are not on
uniprocessors where we disable interrupts to manage things.

Unix still matters.  It has mattered for a very long time, I could argue
it is the most important operating system in the world.  Yeah, windows
won, but it didn't win on merits.

In my opinion you couldn't be more wrong.  We still have the same problems,
we are still trying to grep an answer out of a bunch of info that has just
gotten bigger.

We still want to do the same things and we are doing them better with faster
CPUs, memory, disks, etc.

I maybe think the reason you think that things aren't relevant anymore are
because young people don't get Unix, they just pile on to this framework
and that framework, NONE OF WHICH THEY UNDERSTAND, they just push more
stuff onto the stack.

If you actually have a clue, if you can do stuff, all of that other stuff
becomes fluff.  Yep, some of it is useful but most of it is just there 
because it wants to feel important. 

Unix matters, the way that you can compose stuff still matters, people
who can do that run circles around the people who say Unix doesn't work.
My first job, they said 6 months, I did it 3 weeks by using what Unix 
gave me.