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

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