Subj : Re: Windows vs Linux
To   : boraxman
From : tenser
Date : Mon Apr 25 2022 01:36:48

On 23 Apr 2022 at 12:32p, boraxman pondered and said...
 
 bo>  te> Unix tools are useful.  But it does no one any service not to
 bo>  te> recognize their limitations.
 bo> 
 bo> CSV is not as good a format as delimited text files.  Eric Raymond
 bo> mentions this in the Art of Unix Programming, how the /etc/passwd format
 bo> is superior.  I agree, but at work I'm dealing with excel spreadsheets,
 bo> and exporting to CSV fits in better.

Ahh, typical ESR foolishness: that book does not have a
great reputation for a reason.  CSV obviously _is_ a
delimited text format.  Since you mention /etc/passwd,
suppose a side wanted to put a colon in the GECOS field;
how would one do it?  Or they wanted to put arbitrary
commas in fields (say, 'LastName, FirstName' was the
local convention), but you still wanted compatibility
with tools like `chfn` and `finger`?

There's a reason structured data formats have become
popular.

 bo> Windows is designed around computing being something to consume.  Their
 bo> goal was selling software, and the desktop world was based on
 bo> shrink-wrapped applications packages.  You bought a blank platform (that
 bo> for the most part didn't by default let you write your own programs),
 bo> and then bought "solutions".  Want to write a resume, buy a word
 bo> processor or resume writing program.  Each application was its own
 bo> world, managing its own data, and having all the functionality the
 bo> author thought you needed in its own world.

I'm old enough to remember Steve Balmer literally frothing
at the mouth shouting, "developers! developers! developers!"
I also remember Rob Pike writing that MSFT was were the
innovation was at in 2000, challenging attendees at a
conference to compare developing on 1990s Microsoft platforms
with development for Microsoft platforms just 10 years later.
Now repeat the exercise for Unix.

 bo>  Unix was designed around a different idea, separation of
 bo> data and processing. The tools process text, and can pass from tool to
 bo> tool. Not the most ideal model, but that is what it is.  It was more
 bo> amenable to storing data in a way that is application agnostic, and
 bo> doing whatever transformation you want.

I'd put this rather differently.  Unix wasn't so much designed
as it emerged as a reaction to overly complex systems squeezed
onto a tiny (but affordable!) machine.  That first machine
seemed promising and gave way to another small but affordable
machine; pipes came a few years later.

 bo> Emacs is another unique
 bo> approach, quite different to Unix in that it doesn't rely on
 bo> composability of commands, but ability to run different functions over
 bo> the same instance of data.

That's not unique; it came directly out of the "image" model
of languages like Lisp and its progeny (smalltalk is another
exemplar here).  Stallman never really understood Unix.

 bo> This is the difference, Windows was designed around software being sold
 bo> to the consumer with its own telos, whereas Unix was designed moreso
 bo> around the user constructing their own ends.  It isn't possible for a
 bo> developer to anticipate, or know what the user will want to do.  Now
 bo> Linux and Windows are meeting somewhere in between.

That's simply not true, and betrays lack of study of the relevant
history.  Unix was developed for the internal use of a handful of
exquisitely talented researchers; it achieved success beyond that
for a number of reasons, but one of the biggest was merely accident:
it was at a sweet spot on the price/performance curve where it
could, in Kernighan's words, "ride Moore's law" for two decades.
Indeed, Unix was a bit of a red-headed stepchild in the OS world
for a long time, looked down upon for lacking basic functionality
that was considered requisite for building complex systems (file
locking, for instance).  It had to build those things over time,
leading to frankly a mess of a system that has congealed into modern
Linux and while useful, isn't particularly _good_.

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