And, as LP points out, fails to solve the actual problem because it's still locked into the exact same flawed Unix model, and refuses to integrate with anything else in the system to get things done in a better more systematic way. It's just a slightly refined version of the same tired old Unix way
Feels a bit disingenuous to use that against it, especially when including half the system libs has caused one major and highly publicized security issue already
What a tiresome response, but here, I'm feeling in a loquacious mood, so I'll humor it.
First, what else would I use? I don't just want a "well designed" operating system, I also NEED an open source, customizable one that is compatible with the vast majority of developer tools and build systems and toolchains — and that is, without a doubt, Linux. I don't have a better option from a practical standpoint.
And even from a design standpoint, there simply aren't any better options, because Unix killed off all of the other good alternatives, and now it's essentially the least worst option we have right now. Basically the same situation we were in when the Unix-Hater's Handbook was written.
I mean, what else have we got?
Windows? Windows NT, by way of OpenVMS so I've heard, had some very interesting ideas that I think Linux would have done well to imitate, like having a Common Language Runtime that lets you directly interact with the objects and functions of every application and code base on your system and communicate with them in structured data (something Lisp Machines and Smalltalk did first, better, but I digress), but we are beginning to get that with DBUS and things like nushell, and Windows failed its own promise there and has a vast panoply of its own flaws, not least being Microsoft. So that's not really better at all.
MacOS? There are many ideas from MacOS I'm a huge advocate of Linux stealing, but it is still fundamentally a UNIX, and in my opinion has even more flaws than Linux has, especially since Apple seems to have stopped caring about their software quality. Not to mention, uh, >Apple<.
So you're basically just pulling the old "you think our social system is deeply flawed in some ways and want to change it? Just go live somewhere else then."
Furthermore, I was never intimating that everything Unix did was completely irredeemable and the entire system we've spent all this time and energy building should be thrown out completely in favor of something entirely new. Instead I was responding to the failure, the refusal even, to develop this amazing testament to open source development and the operating system design sensibilities ties that drive it forward or in any new directions, among a certain crowd that determines the worth of something new by how well it adheres to the philosophy of the old.
I think we can build an excellent new system on the bones of the Unix systems we have now, if nothing else because it's what we've got to start with, and it did sort of have some interesting ideas. I just think it requires actually thinking outside of the box and reanalyzing our dogmatic adherence to tired old traditions in light of everything we've learned and everything that's changed in the interim, and the good ideas from other operating systems that we can borrow, instead of just repeating the same ideas over and over.
A flaw in our modern notion of operating system research and development which has depressed even the creators of Unix themselves: and while I don't think Plan 9 was the right move exactly — I think it actually recapitulates many of the flaws and fallacies of unix, such as the idea that everything being a file is particularly useful, or that we should use plain text designed first for people to read and only secondly for a computer to process, in idiosyncratic formats, instead of structured data — if even the original creators of Unix believe that it should be transcended (Dennis Richie), and that the original philosophy is dead (Rob Pike), maybe we should learn something from that?
Maybe it's actually okay to look at what other good ideas there may be in the problem space instead of being myopically, slavishly devoted to a sad old religion.
> Linux won on Unix merits.
First of all, even if that was the case, that doesn't mean it can't improve?
Just because, let's say, it's Unixy design was better than anything else that was on the market at the time, and so it won out against the other options that were available, doesn't mean it is the best possible option — that it can't be improved or developed, or even that the philosophy motivating it wasn't fundamentally flawed and broken in some ways; all it means is that whatever improvements could be made, or whatever was broken in the philosophy to begin with, was less broken or less bad than what happened to exist in competition with it. You're making the exact same mistake that people with conservative tendencies in life me and insisting that just because something work in the past, for whatever reasons it did that, it can't possibly be developed or improved upon. You aren't even saying if it ain't broke don't fix it, you're saying if it wasn't literally the worst, don't fix it.
In fact, I don't even think Unix won out in the server, workstation, academic, scientific, and supercomputing Realms as much as it did because of timeless technical merits and design decisions based on eternal truths that mean we should continue genuflecting to them forever (as much as the purveyors of the Art of Unix would like us to think that) but instead because it happened to have features that happened to be extremely relevant merits in the particular time and place and context it arose in, technologically and economically speaking.
Namely, that it combined extreme minimalism and portability with a reasonable level of composability, even if the composability it offered was awkward and half baked, and because the other offerings had made their own more severe tactical mistakes (Lisp Machines).
Thus it won out mostly almost by historical accident, as most things do, because a proper level of composability and integration, using defined IPC and structured data and well integrated families of tools with non-Turing-complete configuration languages was just too difficult for the hardware of the time, and so the choices were either on operating system with very little composability and flexibility and programmability, or something like unix.
But that isn't the case anymore, yet because it did win, we've retroactively deified it.
We can have our cake and eat it too if we choose to, if we choose to not get sucked in to the North Korea like UNIX cult.
> Windows NT, by way of OpenVMS so I've heard, had some very interesting ideas that I think Linux would have done well to imitate, like having a Common Language Runtime that lets you directly interact with the objects and functions of every application and code base on your system and communicate with them in structured data
The CLR is Microsoft’s answer to the JVM. It is not among the ideas Windows NT inherited from OpenVMS. It is not part of the core OS. Most apps don’t use it. With the advent of WinRT, there is arguably less of a push for its use than there once was.
And when you talk about “communicating with structured data”, I believe you are talking about PowerShell - which apps don’t participate in by default, you need to go to the extra effort of writing PowerShell cmdlets for your app, and many developers don’t. You have to write them in PowerShell itself, or else a CLI language such as C#, F#, C++/CLI, etc. So if your app is written in C or (standard) C++ or Go or Rust or Python or Java or JavaScript or Lisp or whatever, integrating with PowerShell requires adding a new language to your project - no wonder many don’t bother
- what matters is composability (ie programs, possibly running from different computers, being able to use each other's output)
- simplicity is required for composability. Thus the structure less file system and the "everything is a file" design concepts.
The same merits as HTTP in the realm of protocols.
The appeal for a stricter and more principled approach are understandable, and the road one end up favouring largely depends on one's early experience I believe.
I, for one, grew up in a world where I could use either a resilient Linux system that could run a treasure trove of programs written long ago for different machines, or a more modern and principled OS (windows) where a small glitch in some non essential video driver would frequently bring down the whole thing. I went for linux, it won maybe for its merits, maybe by chance, and now I'm concerned that a whole encompassing systemd will eventually bring us back where an unrelated glitch, or backdoor, in an unrelated non essential part will bring down the whole system.
