>>1060300
>Same problem as other OOP implementations: complexity without real reasons.
There are real reasons, but they're not compatible with the UNIX way of doing things. Imagine an OS where everything is an object. Your PNGs and JPEGs are image objects that carry their methods with them. Text files embed fonts and can contain objects inside them. This was before web browsers, which spread UNIX brain damage to the rest of the world.
>no inheritance departing from the mathematics's model of function input/output and its powerful simplicity.
Are you talking about Haskell? What does that have to do with C and UNIX?
>C's (and UNIX, for that matter) core ideas are historical baggage.
No, they're brain damage. The "core ideas" were known to be bad when they were made. The only thing that changed is that a lot of people today have never seen the right way to do things.
>Was it standardized too soon and without enough effort to think about the future?
C was standardized in 1989, long after Lisp machines. There were more kinds of hardware at the time, including segmented and tagged architectures. Hardware "research" now is basically a worse way to do something we could do 50 years ago, but with the ability to run C and UNIX. Compare Intel MPX to real array bounds and descriptors.
>Perhaps, but still better than what was fundamentally the Entreprise (tm) Java (r) OS of its time.
Java is a UNIX language made by Sun.
>This is where you don't make any sense. Praising stuff like PL/I, Ada and Multics then implying that bloat comes from UNIX and not from the Entreprise (tm) crowd responsible for your fat idols.
None of the software that people complain about is written in PL/I or Ada, or runs on Multics. It's all written in C and C++ or in a language with an interpreter or VM written in C and C++. The Linux kernel is 7 MB or larger, plus a bloated RAM disk and all this other bullshit. Full PL/I ran on computers with 64 KB of memory. Multics supported tens if not hundreds of users on 1 MB.
>>1060302
>Just because something doesn't work exactly the way you want doesn't mean it doesn't work.
Having to generate and parse text, which wastes billions of cycles, really doesn't work. Look at dtoa.c some time to see how much C code is needed to convert floats to strings and back. That's called thousands of times to produce a table or XML, just to have it piped to more code to parse them back into floats.
>And where do you suppose that brain damage originates from if it doesn't come from poorly thought-out and implemented features?
Brain damage comes from anti-features that have no rational explanation. Arrays are a feature. Array decay is brain damage. Numbers in different bases are a feature. Treating numbers that start with 0 as octal is brain damage. Function types are a feature. C function pointer syntax is brain damage.
>And yet you blame all the flaws of post-Unix and C operating systems and languages on Unix and C even when their flaws are not present in Unix and C.
The flaws in C++ and JavaScript come from copying C directly. The flaws in GNU/Linux come from copying UNIX directly. The flaws and bugs in C operating systems come from being written in C.
>Unix and C were also reactions to Multics and PL/I yet you don't blame those two for Unix and C-specific problems.
No, because Multics and PL/I did all of these things correctly. If someone said "Ford cars are too complicated" and made a "car" out of sticks and poured gas in the "tank" and burned his garage down, you can't blame Ford for that.
>Except everyone and their mother chose a different way of fixing them, so a lot of Pascal code ends up tied to specific compilers and platforms.
That's better than not fixing them at all.
Date: Tue, 24 Sep 91 14:15:45 -0700
Subject: Decay
What I find totally incredible is that the general level
of systems seems to be lower in almost every respect than it
was ten years ago -- the exception being that the machines
run ten times faster. (Well, mine doesn't; it's a straight
3600 and thoroughly canine. But everyone else's does.)
I maintain a couple of large mailing lists, one of which
has a nine-year history. Nine years ago it ran perfectly on
ITS, and then for another five years on OZ. Then we moved
it to Reagan (a bolix) which really didn't work well, but
was tolerable, but got more and more broken. We've left it
there, despite lost mail and infinite maintenance
aggravation because *we can't find any machine that we have
access to that has more reliable mailing list service*.