cat -vconsidered harmful
Bell Laboratories
Murray Hill, NJ (dec!ucb)wav!research!rob
It seems that UNIX has become the victim of cancerous growth at the hands of
organizations such as UCB. 4.2BSD is an order of magnitude larger than Version
5, but, Pike claims, not ten times better.
The talk reviews reasons for UNIX's popularity and shows, using UCB cat as a
primary example, how UNIX has grown fat. cat isn't for printing files with line
numbers, it isn't for compressing multiple blank lines, it's not for looking at
non-printing ASCII characters, it's for concatenating files.
We are reminded that ls isn't the place for code to break a single column into
multiple ones, and that mailnews shouldn't have its own more processing or joke
encryption code.
Rob carried the standard well for the "spirit of UNIX," and you can look
forward to a deeper look at the philosophy of UNIX in his forthcoming book.
Yeah there are some pieces of code that are super bloated in the FOSS community. I think it does not help overall because it mixes the primitive meaning for an application. Such as systemd or even GCC. I’m starting to like much more simple designs like GNU Shepherd. Or the idea of having a Hurd like kernel (which does not need to be Hurd). Or shifting to more simple CPU ISAs. Designs should have the necessary entropy, not more not less. Trying to allocate more stuff in a design does not help.
I think some part of the GNU community is starting to understand that.
Emacs is bloated? Probably more than it should be. Maybe it should be more minimalistic and move most of it to modules. But is LEGO bloated? Emacs can be regarded bloated because how it is shiped, but not for what it is. Not being modular and programmable would make Emacs not Emacs.
This is a topic very interesting to touch but probably not to talk about it in a comment section hahahha.
I’m pretty experienced in some technical ways, but still learning a lot on Linux / kernel level. I appreciate your comment as I learn more about lower level architectures like this.
Reading about the Hurd microkernal was really interesting, here’s the wiki article for others:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Hurd
Def open to other suggestions on good resources for these topics.
Rob carried the standard well for the “spirit of UNIX,”
if (isatty(1)) {
if (ioctl(1,JMUX,0) >= 0) {
struct winsize win;
if (ioctl(1,JWINSIZE,&win) >= 0) {
screenwidth = win.bytesx;
if (screenwidth == 0)
screenwidth++;
}
}
qflg = Cflg = 1;
(void) gtty(1, &sgbuf);
if ((sgbuf.sg_flags & XTABS) == 0)
usetabs = 1;
}
Might be my fav so far
Tiling window managers fit this for me.
I used Windows 2.something on an old Compaq 386 (16MHz) and it didn’t automatically title anything. There was an option to tile (or cascade) the current window set, but a new window would not cause a retiling. Neither would a window closing.
Windows 1; not 2
-Because of a lawsuit from Apple.
Fwiw, I’ve seen some people demonstrate a robust and efficient keyboard based workflow using floating window management. Sometimes it’s a simple matter of what you set out to learn.
You can always start your own project. Just saying.
Open source projects create corposhit because the developers working on them work for corporations who pay them to create the corposhit. The fact that they’re open source is just so that the corporation can benefit for free from contributions by developers outside the company. That’s all.
