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

[Dan Cross]

On Sun, Jul 4, 2021 at 12:37 AM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> 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.


Uh oh. I know I'm in trouble when I'm referred to by my last name only. :-)

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.
>

Whoa hold on now. I never said that _Unix_ doesn't still matter. It
emphatically does. I agree with you that it, or perhaps more precisely the
evolutionary tree of systems that fit under it's rather large umbrella, is
indeed the most important operating system family in the world. It runs
everywhere and it runs everything; it's literally out of this world. You
will get no argument from me there.

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.
>

But this I disagree with. We may still be trying to solve many of the same
problems, but entirely new categories of problems have sprung up since Unix
was invented, those problems have grown to frankly dwarf the size of the
previous problems, and our modes of interaction with the machine have
totally changed. Consider that the median interaction these days is some
RPC-ish call over HTTP between a user using a gesture interface on a phone
or tablet or something, and some service running somewhere "in the cloud".
Both sides of this (and the myriad stages in between) might be running on
machines that are running "Unix", but this emphatically is _not_ grep, at
least no more than extracting data out of IMS in COBOL under OS/360 was
also a glorified form of "grep".

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.
>

Yes, that was kind of my point. But not only do they not get Unix, they
don't want to, either. Why is that? I think that's the interesting question.


> 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.


I agree with that last statement, but I'm not sure I agree with the former.
I'm not a front-end person; I'll never be a front-end person. Frankly, I
lack the artistic and aesthetic ability to ever be good at that kind of
work. My web site is frankly ugly; I don't care. But I've had the
opportunity to interact with folks who are actually good at front-end
stuff, and they're really sharp. They definitely have a clue. But it's an
entire type of clue that I simply do not nor ever will have.

Many of those people choose to use Linux as their daily driver environment;
bully for them. However, they don't reach for the compliment of tools that
many of us take for granted as being part and parcel of the Unix
environment are not what they reach for first. Most folks aren't using
`sed` to extract something from a typescript program or CouchDB or whatever.

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.
>

Forgive my saying this, but that was then, this is now. The kinds of
automation that I used to wow folks with when I was starting out by being
moderately facile with Unix tools just don't apply to entire classes of
problems anymore. And if the job is working on one of those problems....

This doesn't mean that Unix isn't still important. It obviously is. But it
means that what people are using it for, and how they're using it has
changed. And that does inevitably raise questions about system evolution.

        - Dan C.
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