2 Jan
2023
2 Jan
'23
11:48 p.m.
Arnold Schoenberg said of his 12-tone method of music composition, "in
constraints I find freedom". The best thing about committing to a simple
style and a small set of tools that span the problem space, is the
effect it has on my program composition, imho.
On 01/02/2023 10:43 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
On Mon, Jan 02, 2023 at 10:32:50AM -0700, Adam
Thornton wrote:
But of course the "after it had had a few
years to settle" is doing
a lot of lifting there. During the Unix Wars, yeah, clearly using
v7 sh as lowest-common-denominator was the right choice. After the
establishment of Linux Hegemony sometime in the early 2000s, I think I
remember that you could pretty much count on everyone at least providing
a POSIX shell, even if it wasn't the default. (But of course by then,
"everyone" that wasn't Linux or OS X was already down to more-or-less
Sun,
IBM, HP, and DEC/Compaq.)
I was supporting a commercial product in the early
2000's and there
were all sorts of systems then that had old shells. Yes, you could make
everything a 2 level thing where the first level finds the correct shell,
but that's just fuss. Just make things portable, it's not that hard
and it works everywhere.
When you get to the commercial world, you'd be stunned to see how long
old machines last. If they are solving some problem, and they aren't
broken, nobody replaces them. I'll bet you anything there are still
SCO registers out there, I'll bet there are still PDP-11s out there.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.