/tech/ - Technology★

no

>>925340

why not? it's a very interesting subject and it's on topic

We have that shit topic every week and these threads are always full of schizos who don't know what they're talking about.

I liken starting one's computing career with Unix, say as a undergraduate, to being born in East Africa. It is intolerably hot, your body is covered with lice and flies, you are malnourished and you suffer from numerous curable diseases. But, as far as young East Africans can tell, this is simply the natural condition and they live within it. By the time they find out differently, it is too late. They already think that the writing of shell scripts is a natural act.

>>925481

What would you liken starting one's computing career with Windows to?

>>925497

Waking up in a sewer full of shit, your ass sore from the gangbang. Wandering from HIV infested dick to dick, someone taking a hot piss in your eyes. Then getting beat with nail bats and hot irons until you puke on your own face.

>>925508

But at least there's roads.

>>925510

How would you offer $1 blowjobs, otherwise?

>>925481

What alternatives are there? There are no smalltalk machines to use.

>Can we have a thread discussing the flaws with UNIX/shell scripting?

It isn't LISP

>and how to go about improving upon these languages?

Use LISP

>>925339 (OP)

OK you go ahead OP, since you're so wet in the pussy that you had to make a thread, you must have some deep thoughts to share about this subject.

No? Just trying on a shitpost? Why am I not surprised.

Gayest story of UNIX is that fag baiting Knuth into writing a program and then being like hahaha retard I did it in one shell line.

>>925339 (OP)

>Can we have a thread discussing the flaws with UNIX/shell scripting? and how to go about improving upon these languages?

Unix shells suck. The shells of the various Lisp Machines were quite different. The Symbolics shell, later called "Dynamic Lisp Listener" allowed management of commands, completions, defaults, interactive help, etc.

See for example: https://www.hooktube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk

The interactiveness of that Lisp Machine is quite a step up from what any typical *nix shell offers. The problem of that (GUI) approach: it wasn't very sophisticated on the text terminal side; actually, it was quite bad. For development one needed an extended Common Lisp (or Zetalisp), which was a bit too complex/difficult for many users.

Really, It's not even hate. Most Unix shells are just dumb. Many people like to use primitive text based UIs with lots of corner cases, this makes them appear intelligent for remembering obscure commands and obscure options without real UI help.

Take cp. The shell does not know the various options the command takes. The shell does not know what the types and the syntax of the options are. The shell does not know which options can be combined and which cannot. It can't prompt for shell options. It can't check the command syntax before calling it. It can't provide any help when the syntax is wrong. It can't deal with errors during command execution. There is no in-context help. It can't reuse prior commands other that just editing them on a textual base. The output of the command is just text and not structured data. There are an endless amount of problems. There *have* been attempts to address this by putting different user interfaces on top - for example, IBM provided an extensive menu based administration tool for AIX. You can try Lisp-based shells like scsh, clisp, esh or Emacs. But for the most part all these attempts still suffer from and don't escape the general issues.

>>925619

templeos did it better

https://programmingmadecomplicated.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/there-is-only-one-os-and-its-been-obsolete-for-decades/

>>925619

>[...]The problem of that (GUI) approach: it wasn't very sophisticated on the text terminal side; actually, it was quite bad. For development one needed an extended Common Lisp (or Zetalisp), which was a bit too complex/difficult for many users.

Looking at videos and pictures of Genera Lisp Machines, one problem I see with the user interface is the overload of information. Take for example the video you linked, each mouse button has an option and each can change depending on keyboard acceleration (shift, ctrl...). For the experienced user, this is no problem, but no one start as an experienced user.

>[...]Many people like to use primitive text based UIs with lots of corner cases, this makes them appear intelligent for remembering obscure commands and obscure options without real UI help.

So it's fine to have obscure commands as long the user interface show some help about it? That seems reasonable, but telling that people who remember obscure commands are just pretentious is not.

[...]The shell does not know the various options the command takes. The shell does not know what the types and the syntax of the options are. The shell does not know which options can be combined and which cannot.[...]

The problem with all this is complexity, implementing all these features may add a lot code and mode code is more bugs. If you can get it done without building towers of complexity, be in a specific language or hardware, more power to you, but in how things are in the moment, this might be a bad idea. Also, in Lisp machines there was no memory protection, so it's a rather unfair comparison when you can easily share memory around process so you don't need to serialize them (meaning passing objects instead of text). Taking into account memory protection, the Unix solution is fine.

I know that Powershell sends objects through commands. Since I never used it, I can't pass judgment. But I never heard anyone recommending it over tradicional Unix shell.

>IBM provided an extensive menu based administration tool for AIX

Would that be smit? I used that and it's terrible if you already know your way around AIX and if you're a newcomer in the Unix world, you wouldn't be using AIX.

>>925642

I agree with most of that blog except for the belief that UNIX sucks because it's from the 1970s. UNIX and C sucked back then too, which is why the UNIX-Haters hated UNIX. They used OSes that did it better 10 or 20 years before they wrote their posts and these are still problems almost 3 decades later. That's about 50 years of bugs and flaws that were never fixed and never will be. Multics is older than UNIX, but most of these flaws are not in Multics.

If there's one thing which truly pisses me off, it is the
attempt to pretend that there is anything vaguely "academic"
about this stuff.  I mean, can you think of anything closer
to hell on earth than a "conference" full of unix geeks
presenting their oh-so-rigourous "papers" on, say, "SMURFY:
An automatic cron-driven fsck-daemon"?

I don't see how being "professional" can help anything;
anybody with a vaguely professional (ie non-twinkie-addled)
attitude to producing robust software knows the emperor has
no clothes.  The problem is a generation of swine -- both
programmers and marketeers -- whose comparative view of unix
comes from the vale of MS-DOS and who are particularly
susceptible to the superficial dogma of the unix cult.
(They actually rather remind me of typical hyper-reactionary
Soviet emigres.)

These people are seemingly -incapable- of even believing
that not only is better possible, but that better could have
once existed in the world before driven out by worse.  Well,
perhaps they acknowledge that there might be room for some
incidental clean-ups, but nothing that the boys at Bell Labs
or Sun aren't about to deal with using C++ or Plan-9, or,
alternately, that the sacred Founding Fathers hadn't
expressed more perfectly in the original V7 writ (if only we
paid more heed to the true, original strains of the unix
creed!)