[TUHS] Re: Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix philosophy' The Register

I think there's a parallel from the Unix/Linux systems that we think of as more Unix-like, to the cars and airplanes and other machines of that and earlier eras. It used to be that part of the design of a system, alongside its operation, was the idea of normal, regular maintenance. The system could be pretty simple, but there was some maintenance and wearable parts replacement required. It was expected that there was an administrator or mechanic checking in once in a while to keep things tuned and in "good repair". This worked well, as long as people accepted this responsibility as part of the deal. Now it seems like people want everything done for them automatically, and not to have to know anything about the systems they are using. They want the systems to be smarter so they don't have to know as much. It's sort of like when the private airplane industry tried to engineer any skill required on the part of the pilot, out of the airplane. The results were not good. Planes became more complex, with more points of failure, and pilots did not know how to react to unexpected situations. I see this happening with our computer systems, and the people using them now, too. Of course there's a reasonable middle ground, but I think we've gone a little too far making things "easy", and in fact it's not easier at all, we're just fiddling in a different way, often through random trial and error, it all seems horribly indirect, opaque, and irrational, to support some programmer's idea somewhere, of some perfect abstraction. For example: CMake vs. just learning how to write makefiles properly. You fiddle with CMake and you never really know why it does what it does, especially from one version to the next, "but you don't have to write makefiles".