Unix Haters' Club

Um, Everything is an object? Strongly-typed OS? Stringly-typed? Aspect-oriented OS? I don't even know tbh I'm just spewing buzzwords, you can try it yourself see if there's anything you like the sound of.

I actually made a resolution that when I go back to *x again I'm going to use ruby in place of bash, because I like the idea of starting a program and getting a handle that has stdin and stdout as members.

Reasons why that might not actually happen include:

I don't even speak ruby in the first place
They called the ruby shell ‘irb’ instead of ‘rubysh’

Onyx

Back to the glory days of Commodore 64, eh?

Not that bad of an idea for how to handle a shell though.

Arantor

You always knew where you were with it. No byzantine hardware->software abstractions, no obfuscations, no nothing.

I never had a C64. I did however have a Spectrum.

Buddy

@Arantor said:

No byzantine hardware->software abstractions, no obfuscations, no nothing.

Well did it at least have infinite scrolling?

Filed under: File systems are the pagination of dataflow metaphors.

Arantor

@Buddy said:

Well did it at least have infinite scrolling?

Filed under: File systems are the pagination of dataflow metaphors.

Actually you could do neat scrolling tricks with the backgrounds and sprites you had, so probably.

You could get Flappy Bird for it, does that count? (or should that be in the Bad Ideas thread?)

Onyx

I never got the flappy bird rage. Sure, tricky, mostly due to physics being a bit broken IMHO, but not anywhere near something like IWBTG, which was buggy as well as being a prick to you.

Then again, I only played it for like 3 mins on a friend's phone before getting laughed at for "sucking" and the phone got taken away. Yeah, here, have Castlevania, or Megaman, and let me take away the controller after 2 minutes. See how you fare.

Arantor

I never got it either, but a lot of people did, apparently. People are crazy.

Arantor

@fatbull said:

Filed under: I miss EDIT.COM

I just realised something, there is something worse than EDIT.COM.

Who remembers EDLIN?

fatbull

Ah, the "everything is a $thing" mentality.

Why, yes, everything is a stream of bytes. If something can be stored on a computer, it can be dumped as a stream of bytes. That's trivial. The reverse direction is the problem. A stream of bytes is not a pretty much anything else.

In any Real Programming Language™ you have data types. In Java, for example, everything (or almost everything) is an Object, but you can easily cast it back to String[], List<?>, InputStream, or whatever it is. And even if you have an actual stream of bytes, there is usually an obvious way to parse it and turn it into something useful.

Try that in a shell script. No, that stream of bytes find just dumped is not an array of file names. It's just a stream of bytes. Really. We separate file names with 0x0A bytes, but those could be part of filenames, too, so you can never be sure. It's just a stream of bytes, after all. You can grep it, sed it, cut it, or write it to a file if you want, but it's still just a stream of bytes. Don't you dare process it! Because there is no way to actually do that safely and portably.

Filed under: Apparently escaping strings is NP hard.

ben_lubar

find -print0 uses 0x00 bytes to separate filenames, and filenames can't have 0x00 bytes in them.

fatbull

I said portable. Also many tools lack a -read0 counterpart.

tufty

edlin, coming as it does from a toy OS, is a mere toy version of the one true editor, ed

tufty

@Buddy said:

Um, Everything is an object? Strongly-typed OS? Stringly-typed? Aspect-oriented OS?

Aye, that's what I was getting at. "everything is a file" is one model, but it could be reversed - "everything is a process" could be workable, or "everything is a lambda" or "everything is a continuation". It's all interchangeable, more or less, although some make more sense in certain situations than others.

My main problem with all of this, though, is the "everything is a" part. It's the same kind of thinking that leads <a @twatwood to say "you're doing it wrong", it's "all I have is a hammer".

A process is not a file. A thread is not a file. A device on my machine is not a file. Nor is a network connection, nor … well, you get the idea.

Yamikuronue

Everything is a series of positive and negative charges encoded via electrical current.

cartman82

Ugh! I can't believe we came this deep into the thread and this guy didn't come up.

http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/

Click on that link and then click on any of the links on the right, under "GREATEST HITS". Some epic rants there.

dkf

Everything is an illusion! We are figments in the imagination of bored cicada named Brian.

dkf

@fatbull said:

A stream of bytes is not a pretty much anything else.

That's why most serialization formats include some bytes (usually in the header) to indicate just what it is that they encode. That lets you use a tool like file to figure out the reverse operation.

@fatbull said:

Don't you dare process it! Because there is no way to actually do that safely and portably.

Shell scripts are about taking advantage of the fact that you're not running them on arbitrary data to Get Shit Done Now. You can always do things by writing a beautiful program in another language for the task, but most people don't have that kind of time.

darkmatter

13 year or 7?

dkf

I don't know; he's not told me.

Arantor

But is he the messiah or just a very naughty boy?

dkf

@Arantor said:

But is he the messiah or just a very naughty cicada?

FTFY

Arantor

Touché.

antiquarian

@cartman82 said:

Ugh! I can't believe we came this deep into the thread and this guy didn't come up.

http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/

Click on that link and then click on any of the links on the right, under "GREATEST HITS". Some epic rants there.

Every post there seems to have an extended flame war in the comments.

One of the comments makes a good guess about the real purpose of the blog:

It's becoming increasingly apparent: You don't hate Linux. You love it. You want to save it.

DoctorJones

@Buddy said:

Um, Everything is an object? Strongly-typed OS? Stringly-typed? Aspect-oriented OS? I don't even know tbh I'm just spewing buzzwords, you can try it yourself see if there's anything you like the sound of.

How about an OO-OS, we could refer to it as an O_o OS.

Filed under: I suppose lots of OSes are already O_o. The shite acronyms club.

boomzilla

http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2013/03/carry-on.html

"Several of you asked for a comment thread reset. Here you go. Not sure what kind of BS linux-based system falls over at 5000 comments."

Filed Under: LOL

boomzilla

@DoctorJones said:

Filed under: I suppose lots of OSes are already O_o. The shite acronyms club.

INB4 Beos fanbois.

DoctorJones

@Onyx said:

I never got the flappy bird rage.

@Arantor said:

I never got it either, but a lot of people did, apparently. People are crazy.

That's why crap shows like X Factor and $country's got talent are still on TV.

Unfortunately you don't have to be good to be popular and you don't have to be shit to be unpopular.

Filed under: Fucking Simon Cowell

trithne

@cartman82 said:

Ugh! I can't believe we came this deep into the thread and this guy didn't come up.

http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/

It reminds me of @morbiuswilters

ufmace

I thought Linux was sometimes everything is a file, and other times everything is a network connection. I'm sure it makes sense somehow for apps to go through a network connection to talk to the display, and another network connection to send sound to the speakers.

Wukl

And sometimes they're both.

dkf

@DoctorJones said:

Fucking Simon Cowell

This is where we need the purple cactus.

Arantor

Purple cacti are too good for Cowell.

dkf

I propose we conduct some scientific experiments on Cowell to determine if your assertion is true.

Arantor

@dkf said:

I propose we conduct some scientific experiments on Cowell to determine if your assertion is true.

I wouldn't want to corrupt poor innocent cacti.

anonymous234

X11 is fucked up even by Linux standards.

Good thing Wayland will be replacing it soon. See, it barely took 25 years for the community to create something better. The system works!

MetaStorm

Remembering all the arcane editor commands is a pain.

An easy way for me to update a file, is to just use WinSCP. Then I just have to double click the file to transfer it from the remote linux server to my Windows desktop, make the edits in windows, then double click to send it back to the server.

Captain

That's not really much longer than it took Microsoft to fully replace MS DOS. Or Apple to replace its old OSs with OS X.

ben_lubar

They still haven't fully replaced Windows XP and it's been over 12 years already. XP was released closer to Windows 95 than to today.

dkf

XP was where they managed to get the consumer side away from ~~M$DOG~~ MS-DOS.

Arantor

@dkf said:

XP was where they managed to get the consumer side away from <s>M$DOG</s> MS-DOS.

And yet you could run QBASIC in full screen and even do the video graphics stuff, which can't be done in Vista and up.

My stepdad rather laments this fact, which caused me to have to spend several hours teaching him how to use DOSBox because the old fart won't learn anything more sane.

danixdefcon5

@darkmatter said:

On HP-UX, backspace just cu^H^H^H^H AKJDF:AIDFJA
On HP-UX, backspace just causes those things you see above.

stty erase ^H

and it isn't just an HP-UX thing. I learned that particular "trick" thanks to AIX.