Re: [TUHS] Were all of you.. Hippies?

On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 07:15:13AM +0000, shawn wilson wrote: Except for your network, of course -- that might have a file interface available... provided by your shell. Because of course /dev/tcp should be a shell feature. Why would anyone put that in the kernel? Linux (and the wider later-unixlike world) is full of these bizarre little quirks -- due to the earlier-mentioned practicality. At first it was people scratching their own itches, then it switched over to people scratching corporate itches. Does it work? Sure. But one of the things that makes a system well-loved is consistent application of design principles. That's why those weirdos mourned their LispMs (and why their emacs descendants tend to live inside their text editor). It's why the plan 9 people won't shut up about plan 9. And there are lots of examples of people singing the praise of "everything's a file" -- and even that "open, read, write, close" specifically was enough to get things done. Linux has around 400 system calls, and still supports just about ever (userspace-exposed) syscall it has ever had. This is why it needs a thousand little binary shims to get stuff done, and the push for systemd was the pendulum swinging back the other direction. Since open/read/write/close isn't enough, we'll build a layer to handle all the weirdness, and now all you need is dbus... But it sure boots fast! khm