Subj : Re: Windows vs Linux
To   : tenser
From : boraxman
Date : Mon Apr 25 2022 13:01:55

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

He explains it.  You use an escape character.

I've written a CSV parser, and one which is based on the delimited format.  The latter is far easier.

CSV is OK to use from a users POV (and if you have a parser already, better than a format only accessible to its parent application), but if you were making your own format, you wouldn't use it.

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

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

Perhaps, but I find it more pragmatic.  Solutions born from people trying to solve problems have stood the test of time.  They may not be optimal, often arent, and you could do better if we tried again, but they are established and understood.

I've used Windows since the Windows 3.1 days, and stopped using it at home at about Windows 98 (though I do have XP, it was never my main OS).  It was a product from a company trying to sell product.  That results in a different product.

 te> That's not unique; it came directly out of the "image" model
 te> of languages like Lisp and its progeny (smalltalk is another
 te> exemplar here).  Stallman never really understood Unix.
 te> 
 te> That's simply not true, and betrays lack of study of the relevant
 te> history.  Unix was developed for the internal use of a handful of
 te> exquisitely talented researchers; it achieved success beyond that
 te> for a number of reasons, but one of the biggest was merely accident:
 te> it was at a sweet spot on the price/performance curve where it
 te> could, in Kernighan's words, "ride Moore's law" for two decades.
 te> Indeed, Unix was a bit of a red-headed stepchild in the OS world
 te> for a long time, looked down upon for lacking basic functionality
 te> that was considered requisite for building complex systems (file
 te> locking, for instance).  It had to build those things over time,
 te> leading to frankly a mess of a system that has congealed into modern
 te> Linux and while useful, isn't particularly _good_.
 te> 

I can agree that if the problem was approached again today, we could do better.  Microsoft is changing, and Powershell and WSL is recognition of that.  They wouldn't be doing this otherwise, would they??  They are catching up because a powerful command language is important and fundamental, even if not all will imagine a use for it.  In some ways, MS has improved, with Powershell passing objects, rather than Unix's plain text only.

My argument was never that Unix "got it right", only that it closer resembles a model of computing which makes the computer more usable as a general purpose machine.  That Windows is implementing features that Unix is known for, I think is acknowledgement of it.  MacOS is based on BSD, and Apple has python installed by default.

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