/tech/ - Technology★

It's the reason why both CLI and GUI on Linux are shit. People developing them inherited wrongs from both of the worlds. Like vimfags are trying to copy 50-year old mainframe interface while gnomeshits ex-winfaggots too poor to buy a mac and learn some basics of human-computer experience from industry leaders.

>>935941

>CLI on Linux

>shit

Ok I get the GUIs being trash (most of them at least), but what's so bad about the GNU/Linux CLI?

All software is shit. Free software hasn't been historically any less shit than proprietary software. How has free software failed? Your quote is fucking retarded you nigtard. >>>/r/linux/

>>935942

No separate modifier key action, i.e. you can't hold shift and see further command suggestions like you could do in DOS.

No direct video memory writes, so general terminal clunkiness

Modal search mode. I want to fucking write text, I expect letter keys to write letters and arrows to move pointer, enter key to return carriage on new line and escape to exit. Instead I have to learn a 50-page manual on how to exit a text editor in 5 easy and totally intuitive key strokes.

Every GNU operating system, even bloated ones come with vi instead of full vim without useful manuals and has general "just connect to internet and use google breh" attitude. Windows had hypertext documentation no one actually used, but is it really hard to write one for a free software project?

man command is useless 99% of the times. I don't want to know what this program does in all use cases, I want to know how to do most common things X and Y. There's a reason people started tl;dr pages project.

bash is not interactive and you have to learn three different shells to find out the most suitable but then you end up writing scripts in python because it's easier

>>935936 (OP)

This is the reason you should learn Vim first before/instead of Emacs.

>>935941

>both CLI and GUI on Linux are shit.

Just chisel your programs into stone tablets and use divine prophecy as your compiler.

This is why we must put Linux in the classroom

>the average user is brain dead

This isn't exactly fucking news.

>>935951

>No separate modifier key action, i.e. you can't hold shift and see further command suggestions like you could do in DOS.

I looked it up and couldn't find any documentation about what you mean here. I even made a FreeDOS VM to check and I couldn't get it to work. Just as a guess, do you mean something like tab completion? because *nix has had that. It's had it for a very long time. Just press tab a few times and you'll get completions on the program or on a directory/file path argument.

>No direct video memory writes, so general terminal clunkiness

Not sure what you're referring to. I assume this is a low-level technicality that doesn't directly impact the user? Or is there something I haven't seen yet in my time using *nix (a few years at least)

>Modal search mode. I want to fucking write text, I expect letter keys to write letters and arrows to move pointer, enter key to return carriage on new line and escape to exit. Instead I have to learn a 50-page manual on how to exit a text editor in 5 easy and totally intuitive key strokes.

I'll assume this is about text editors. You know there's nano, right? That one puts all the key commands you need to know right on the bottom of the screen, and the cursor movement and adding of text works exactly as you describe. What could be easier?

When it comes to your idea of a text editor though, it sounds reasonable on the surface, but there are issues. escape exits, but how do you save? If escape saves and quits, then if you edited something and decided you didn't want to make that change, now you gotta go back through the whole file and backspace (because you don't have the flexibility of vi/vim normal mode commands) backspace through everything you just typed in order to make sure that the file is back to the way it was. And what if you want to save progress so far without closing the editor just yet? Just a few more conveniences and oh look! We end up with exactly nano.

>Every GNU operating system, even bloated ones come with vi instead of full vim without useful manuals and has general "just connect to internet and use google breh" attitude. Windows had hypertext documentation no one actually used, but is it really hard to write one for a free software project?

Ok here's a decent point. vi should have been depreciated a long time ago in favor of vim. Just as a side note on that, RedHat now ships with vim only. vi is a symlink to vim.

For the manuals, there's man. You mention that there should also be locally-installed hypertext docs, but you yourself say in the same sentence that nobody used them.

>man command is useless 99% of the times. I don't want to know what this program does in all use cases, I want to know how to do most common things X and Y. There's a reason people started tl;dr pages project.

>written in node

wew

But once again, good point. I generally don't have a problem with manpages, but there are some ridiculously long ones out there that could use a shortened version.

>bash is not interactive and you have to learn three different shells to find out the most suitable but then you end up writing scripts in python because it's easier

Ok now we're back to not making sense. How is bash not interactive? If you're at a bash shell, you're using it interactively. Pray tell, what are these three shells you speak of? Because on most systems it's only bash. Maybe there's dash for performance reasons on distros like debian, but typically only bash is installed.

What a shit thread.

What a fucking shit thread.

The duck shit syndrom can be extended to literaly anything. It's more difficult to say that someone is wrong/scammed than to learn him first what you think is right.

Garbage thread certainly made by the fucktard trolling unix everyday thinking it's any useful at all. I think this guy is schizophrenic, and thinks that he lives in the 70'. Fucking useless.

I would like to remind everyone that Stallman never liked Unix at all. He based off Unix because it was a good enough to work as a basic platform and it was popular throughout the world's universities. Stallman's ideal system would be a Lisp system. The reason why he didn't write a Lisp system is because Unix was statistically more popular throughout the world's universities.

>>936034

He did write a lisp system. It's called GNU Emacs

>>935951

>man command is useless 99% of the times. I don't want to know what this program does in all use cases, I want to know how to do most common things X and Y. There's a reason people started tl;dr pages project.

Man was even worse when it was made than it is today. Everything used to come with an enormous amount of documentation. Today they tell you to search Stack Overflow and Google, but back then people were expected to actually learn things.

>>936032

>The duck shit syndrom can be extended to literaly anything. It's more difficult to say that someone is wrong/scammed than to learn him first what you think is right.

The "ducks" were never given a choice, which sucks. Brendan Eich and his management assumed JavaScript users would be Java baby ducks, so he copied Java. Stallman assumed the only people who would use Free Software were C/UNIX baby ducks, so he copied UNIX.

>>936034

>The reason why he didn't write a Lisp system is because Unix was statistically more popular throughout the world's universities.

Baby duck syndrome is more common in weenie cultures, so a Lisp system would be a cure for the syndrome. He could have made something better, but he went for the baby duck users, which sucks.

    This has indeed puzzled me about FSF.  Here is an
    organization with incredibly lofty (IMHO misguided, but
    lofty) political ideals, and apparently no
    technological or engineering ideals whatsoever.  It's
    as if there were a shite cartel charging high prices for
    shite, and a counter-culture grassroots movement
    agitating that shite should be free.

    For those who want shite, I guess it matters.

This is an insult to shite.  At least things can grow in
shite, while everything dies in U***.  Both stink.

If a vendor decides to do something about the crass
inadequacies of UNIX we should give them three cheers, not
start a flame war about how the DIRECTORY command *must*
forever and ever be called ls because that is what the great
tin pot Gods who wrote UNIX thought was a nice, clear name
for it.

The most threatening thing I see in computing today is the
"we have found the answer, all heretics will perish"
attitude. I have an awful lot of experience in computing, I
have used six or seven operating systems and I have even
written one. UNIX in my view is an abomination, it has
serious difficulties, these could have been fixed quite
easily, but I now realize nobody ever will.

At the moment I use a VMS box, I do so because I find that I
do not spend my time having to think in the "UNIX" mentality
that centers around kludges. I do not have to tolerate a
help system that begins its insults of the user by being
invoked with "man".

>>936098

>Baby duck syndrome is more common in weenie cultures, so a Lisp system would be a cure for the syndrome. He could have made something better, but he went for the baby duck users, which sucks.

Proof that this guy literally does not actually read what the conversation is about, and just tries to say "hey you know that problem that exists? Lisp machines would magically solve that problem in some way that i'm not going to actually explain because i'm just making shit up"

>>936026

< No direct video memory writes, so general terminal clunkiness

You don't need direct video memory writes, you just need to fake it for the foreground application.

> Not sure what you're referring to. I assume this is a low-level technicality that doesn't directly impact the user? Or is there something I haven't seen yet in my time using *nix (a few years at least)

This is why DOS programs generally have an ugly but usable graphical user interface and Unix programs have an unusable command line interface.

> I generally don't have a problem with manpages

< man bash

/drops mic

>>936107

>terminal stuff

I'm admittedly a brainlet when it comes to this subject. Can you explain what you mean by any of this? Not being argumentative on this one. Just genuinely curious.

>man bash

Well yeah, it's going to be big because it's bash. It's a scripting (or gluing as some like to call it) language. So it has to explain all the stuff related to that. If it's left out, then where would shell scripting be explained in detail? On a separate manpage? What would that be called, and how would someone know that it exists?

There's no easy answer to that, due to the nature of shells themselves.

>>936107

There's info, faggot.

>>936101

He's your ordinary Internet troll. He's not interested in doing some real work (i.e. writing a free software Lisp OS), he's only interested in shitting over other people's work.

>>935936 (OP)

“Baby Duck Syndrome” is a meme used to invalidate any argument, like that Shrek meme. Just try using Russian AIBs, these faggots will call anything a “Baby Duck Syndrome”.

>>936030

this, also:

SAGE

>>936098

>This has indeed puzzled me about FSF. Here is an organization with incredibly lofty (IMHO misguided, but lofty) political ideals, and apparently no technological or engineering ideals whatsoever.

Holy shit this, free software would be so much bigger if the FSF wasn't just one giant lefty circlejerk of lawyers with very little technological knowledge.

>>936174

You have no idea what is the FSF and what is their purpose. The purpose of the FSF isn't to increase popularity for the usage of free software, their purpose is political activism to encourage the world that freedom in software is important to a free society. The FSF would rather reject popularity if it ever means promoting the adoption of proprietary software and other user hostile technologies.

>>936174

You do realise the GNU project is part of the FSF right?

>>936214

>their purpose is political activism

lol no their purpose is to parasite on a non-profit movement through PR and lobbying and make money from it. Activist as always are just useful idiots.

>>936224

stay woke my nigger

>>935951

I'd like to add to this:

- TUI is not CLI

- CLI requires you to know everything about the program's features before you run them

- even CLI programs can have surprises: like ffmpeg's -ss argument not being order-agnostic is retarded

>learning is hard when you don't care

duh

make people care by h4xx0ring their icloud nudes

>>935936 (OP)

This is true with me and Macs

I can't do the simplest things with them

Accept all our changes, goyim, otherwise you're just a baby dick ell ell ell oh oh oh oelelelelelelelelelele

Command line is a retarded boomer's vision of human-computer interaction they looked up in science fiction. HELLO COMPUTAH! Since speech recognition was not available at the time and pointer-device-centric interfaces were vaporware developed at Xerox PARC, they decided to substitute human speech with keyboard typing, and save on memory writes by giving commands names like ls, man, cp.

wow no fuckhead in this thread has worked on large clusters, distributed computing systems or anything of the like. None of you know what the fuck you are talking about.

>>>/muhbabyguiinterfacewindowscucks/

>>935951

>Windows had hypertext documentation no one actually used, but is it really hard to write one for a free software project?

>man command is useless 99% of the times. I don't want to know what this program does in all use cases, I want to know how to do most common things X and Y. There's a reason people started tl;dr pages project.

>>936107

>> I generally don't have a problem with manpages

>< man bash

>/drops mic

Use 'info bash', and there is your book-sized, indexed and hyperlinked document. You can read it in a standalone application, inside Emacs, and inside Vim. You can also get in in HTML form, as a PDF or even printed out.

http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/

https://shop.fsf.org/collection/books-docs

>>935936 (OP)

No, it's because people have grown complacent and become desensitized to absolute shit that shits all over your rights (see Kikeflix, steam, Jewdobe, Amajew). They don't care they're treated as dirt as long as they can watch their Hollyjew movies/play gaymes/read their remotely-erasable books

>>936241

>TUI is not CLI

Most people here will gladly take any TUI over a GUI in 99% of cases (especially in the case ofmodern, mouse driven-, keyboard-hostile, bloated GUIs)

>CLI requires you to know everything about the program's features before you run them

Patently false.

<the most common use cases for common people using tar are 'tar -xvzf' or 'tar -xvjf'.

<you can use find just fine using the -name or -regex predicates without having to learn anything advanced

<most common uses of sed involve just s/regex/substitution

>even CLI programs can have surprises: like ffmpeg's -ss argument not being order-agnostic is retarded

This I agree with; it's annoying, but sometimes it's unavoidable. Also annoying is inconsistent option syntax: xmodmap uses one hyphen for long options, while most GNU commands use 2. Others like ps accept options without a hyphen. And then there's whether you're allowed to put a space between the option and the parameter or not.

>>936107

>>man bash

You're supposed to use / to search. It's not the best, but still light years better than Winders's shit HELP command and its lack of pager. There's also info pages for plenty of programs like others have said.

>>936348

>No, it's because people have grown complacent and become desensitized to absolute shit that shits all over your rights (see Kikeflix, steam, Jewdobe, Amajew). They don't care they're treated as dirt as long as they can watch their Hollyjew movies/play gaymes/read their remotely-erasable books

You now realize this is completely unfixable. Why the fuck do people still try to change this?

>>936348

>Most people here will gladly take any TUI over a GUI in 99% of cases (especially in the case ofmodern, mouse driven-, keyboard-hostile, bloated GUIs)

this.

I have a mouse, but don't have a mouse driver for MINIX and have never felt the need to write one. Typing 
"rm x y z" is a lot faster than clicking five times and then having to convince the system that you really, truly, 
mean it and this is not a mistake and that you are consenting adult over 18 and that you completely understand 
the consequences and you still want to do it.
--Andrew S. Tanenbaum

The computers went wrong when you made them for niggers. That's when it went wrong. It's like how many 
people, it's like, "Ugh it's a command line.." Ah, fuck you man. White people don't mind it, ok? The white 
people are like, "Yeah it's a command line. So what's your point?" The niggers are all like, "Nooo! We don't 
like the command line!" Here's the difference in a white person and a nigger: Do you like the command 
line? Ok, you're a nigger. Fuck you. Get the fuck out.
-- Terry A. Davis

>>936348

> You're supposed to use / to search. It's not the best, but still light years better than Winders's shit HELP command and its lack of pager. There's also info pages for plenty of programs like others have said.

I consider man and info to be complements of each other. Manpages are great for a quick reference of a command-line application which can fit on a few paper page (at most), and info for a fully-fledged user manual. When you think about it, even before GNU it was that you had man-pages and you had actual full-sized books. If you wanted to know the options with which to invoke the AWK interpreter you looked up the manpage, and if you wanted to actually learn AWK you bought the book.

>>936377

A TUI is literally just a bad GUI

>>936298

I agree that managing large clusters with lots of repetitive tasks can be done effectively through a command line and scripts. It doesn't mean a personal computer operating system should have a "lol just google it" 50-year old computing paradigm command prompt interface and new everbloated confusing GUI every two months.

>>936298

Anon large clusters are managed through a batch job queue usually some hyper proprietary system.

>>936377

Fun fact: Temple OS command line is more interactive than bash.

>>936386

the hell does that mean?

>>936101

Lisp promotes customization and changing every aspect of your computer. If a Lisp user wants to change things, that's considered a good thing in Lisp culture, which means they are less susceptible to baby duck syndrome. The best solution is teaching multiple languages and OSes at the same time, including some that are considered bad, but UNIX is so broken and bloated that they would have to avoid UNIX and UNIX languages entirely.

>>936283

AT&T guys never invented the command line or the hierarchical file system for that matter. The command names like ls and cp are just a rip-off of Multics, which had full and abbreviated commands, and ls is short for list and cp for copy.

http://multicians.org/multics-commands.html

>>936348

>Also annoying is inconsistent option syntax: xmodmap uses one hyphen for long options, while most GNU commands use 2. Others like ps accept options without a hyphen. And then there's whether you're allowed to put a space between the option and the parameter or not.

That's because UNIX weenies did not care to make commands consistent, which promotes baby duck syndrome by misleading users into thinking everything else must be even worse. Since shills constantly say how "simple" and "easy to learn" UNIX is, the weenies believe that a better OS with more features must be even harder to learn than UNIX, even though it's easier and needs less code because of greater code reuse. If the code does the same thing as other code already on the machine, like parsing command options, it doesn't have to be repeated, so it's more consistent and easier to learn too.

    I think I've identified the fundamental problem with
unix.  It's not that unix fellates worm-infested camels.
It's that

   NO ONE DOES ANYTHING ABOUT IT.

    Unix is full of dumb bugs that any competent hacker
could fix in ten minutes.  But more than ten minutes is
wasted by *every* hacker instead.  ``Yup, that's another
dumb unix bug.  Sigh.  Well, let's write an elaborate
work-around...''  The problem is cultural: there seems to be
an attitude of ``you can't fight city hall.''

    ITS and the lispm are such wins not because they are
better-designed (they may be, but god knows they have plenty
of brain damage in them too) but because they have a culture
of ``That symbolics namespace editor sucks, so I spent ten
minutes writing a better one and installed it on b:.''

    What I can't figure out is why there isn't a giant
market for improved unix software.  For example, it seems
like it would be straightforward to write a decent C macro
processor or garbage collector, and that you could make a
bundle of money selling them because everyone would want
them.

    But no one does this.  Why not?  Maybe it's because
weenies are so used to not fighting city hall that they
can't believe things could ever be better?

>>936388

I believe he's referring to the fact that the CLI in Temple OS has a Holy C interpretter running in the background so you can write and run C code in the "shell". I might be wrong but I believe that the Temple OS "shell" is simply just a frontend or runtime for the interpretter that Terry wrote.

>>936392

>quote about nobody rewriting shit

holy shit this might be the one hafway decent point you've made in the entire time you've been shitting up this board. I'd like to extend an olive branch on this point, highlighting that this was actually a part of the original UNIX philosophy. I know, I know, you're not gonna like the idea of actually appreciating anything related to UNIX, but hear me out.

From the 1978 Bell System Technical Journal:

>Design and build software, even operating systems, to be tried early, ideally within weeks. Don't hesitate to throw away the clumsy parts and rebuild them.

And your quote is right that there may very well be a cultural problem at hand. I couldn't really say whether it actually exists or to what extent, (that's a whole separate debate entirely), but hey, at least we're getting somewhere.

>>936098

>Stallman assumed the only people who would use Free Software were C/UNIX baby ducks, so he copied UNIX.

No. That's just your own bias.

>>936403

>holy shit this might be the one hafway decent point you've made in the entire time you've been shitting up this board.

Most of my points are decent, but at least we can agree on one of them.

>I'd like to extend an olive branch on this point, highlighting that this was actually a part of the original UNIX philosophy. I know, I know, you're not gonna like the idea of actually appreciating anything related to UNIX, but hear me out.

It was part of the original UNIX philosophy, and it's a good thing, but not anymore. UNIX could have gone another way and evolved into something better than Multics if they threw away parts that sucked, but that's not what happened. Plan 9 is a partial attempt at fixing UNIX, but it doesn't go far enough. Fixed UNIX is called Multics.

>>Design and build software, even operating systems, to be tried early, ideally within weeks.

This is usually a good thing to do, but most programming languages are much better for this than C. C was bad for the 70s, maybe acceptable if you have 16 KB of RAM on a 16-bit computer, but it's a huge waste of time and money. A lot of projects are delayed or never finished because of C, like the F-35 and all those microkernels from the 90s.

>Don't hesitate to throw away the clumsy parts and rebuild them.

That was true in UNIX a long time ago, like when the Bourne shell replaced the Thompson shell, but the philosophy changed long before UNIX-HATERS was written.

>And your quote is right that there may very well be a cultural problem at hand. I couldn't really say whether it actually exists or to what extent, (that's a whole separate debate entirely), but hey, at least we're getting somewhere.

A lot of UNIX weenies respond to criticism of UNIX by blaming the user, but other cultures tend to fix problems, like FORTRAN and BASIC line numbers. Some programmers didn't think it was a problem, but many did.

>>936496

Stallman copied UNIX because he believed users have baby duck syndrome. He might be right, but he still went after UNIX weenies instead of DOS users or Lisp machine users.

   I predict that you will be programming an MSDOS machine
   within 5 years.

Yeesh, that's pretty grim.  I'm programming an MSDOS-machine
*now*, but it's running Windows 3.0.  Windows 3 has
``orderly'' shared memory, an application-oriented IPC
mechanism that many programs already exploit in a meaningful
way, and shared libraries -- when will the *n* different
versions of Unix get them ?  

Oh yeah, and it might not be the world's most flexible
window system, but at least you know what you get when
you're running Windows.

The real story is that by the time the Unix camps get
together, there will be a large portion of users out there
who will be doing hairy real-world things without the
``help'' of Unix.  Already, PCs and Macs help run
long-distance phone services and produce magazines -- not
``computer'' magazines but real magazines like Spy, Wigwag,
and the Source.

Unix is best for hacking Unix utilities.  Of course, the
Lisp Machine was a far better machine for meta-hacking.
Unix is poor choice for end-users on one hand and pure
hackers on the other...

>>936587

>Stallman was not capable of understand the superior lisp systems for him to copy it.

Was that why he had to copy paste code from Symbolics and pretend that he wrote it?

>>935936 (OP)

no, this is

https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thompson.pdf

>>936588

Yes he had to copy past because he could not figure out how to write his own implementation.

>>936587

No. Stallman had extensive experience as an operating systems writer with Lisp operating systems before starting GNU.

>>936590

It's actually easy to overcome this by writing your own bootstrapping software that's designed to bootstrap other tools that you have verified for yourself.

>>936596

>writer with Lisp operating systems before

Ah yes you mean the Symbolics operating system that he happened to use was not a developer of and was incapable of properly copying.

>>936597

>Its actually easy to overcome this by just manually validating every single thing you will ever use

LOL

>>936599

If you're actually paranoid enough to be affected by this issue, then you are going to take the time to do this for every piece of software you use. Otherwise this issue is trivial because we don't actually care that it exists. Those are the only two options.

>>936601

>it's actually easy to overcome this

>then you are going to take the time to do this for every piece of software you use.

Ah yes because if you need to do something that means it's easy!

>>936140

Which no one uses.

>>936645

Because people are too busy sperging about manpages. Every time I edit a makefile that's non-trivial I have the make manual in a buffer right next to it.