Post ASvtCeRHMdhz6mOcD2 by dcc@pp.dembased.xyz
(DIR) More posts by dcc@pp.dembased.xyz
(DIR) Post #ASvskp7o2aAQ8r1Cro by rootbsd@pp.dembased.xyz
2023-02-22T08:53:08.930529Z
3 likes, 0 repeats
This is such a weird table lol
(DIR) Post #ASvtCeRHMdhz6mOcD2 by dcc@pp.dembased.xyz
2023-02-22T08:58:10.400080Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@rootbsd cc @theorytoe
(DIR) Post #ASvtFZBFN7QnfTHrqi by rootbsd@pp.dembased.xyz
2023-02-22T08:58:42.279951Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@dcc @theorytoe Source http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/
(DIR) Post #ASvx6mq9cDTRF9USAa by screwtape@mastodon.sdf.org
2023-02-22T09:39:19Z
2 likes, 0 repeats
@rootbsd @dcc @theorytoe the gist is always that plan9 is the right answer, right? Or companies the ex-plan9 people ended up at.
(DIR) Post #ASvxPQHjhOoknAHI12 by rootbsd@pp.dembased.xyz
2023-02-22T09:45:18.219522Z
2 likes, 0 repeats
@screwtape @dcc @theorytoe I can see that, you and @p would agree on a lot of these. Charlie Root says "use the best tool for the job, but more importantly, use free and open source software." There, so simple. No table from me.
(DIR) Post #ASx3MjnRUeVHJtAf3Y by p@freespeechextremist.com
2023-02-22T22:27:18.045109Z
3 likes, 1 repeats
@screwtape @rootbsd @dcc @theorytoe The gist is simple is better. "cat(1) came back from Berkeley waving flags."The MIT-style that GNU came from and the "just hack it in" style that developed in Berkeley run counter to the really easy principle: you make a tool, a foundational building block, and you build using the simple building blocks instead of turning the userspace into a Swiss army knife shantytown. Instead of including netcat, for example, GNU added TCP support to bash...then, because it wasn't a general, simple, modular feature, they had to add TCP support to gawk. I have no idea where else they've stuffed it. ls(1) on a GNU system detects whether its output is a terminal and maybe columnizes its output and maybe not: no longer a simple building block. But so many scripts still rely on its output, so it tries to detect if it's part of a pipeline or not, and if you want to turn some skinny output into wide output, you've got to write it. Instead of adding this feature to ls, Plan 9 just includes another program, mc(1), that turns its input into multi-column output, so you can just pipe ls(1) to that (and, in fact, /bin/lc is a one-liner: "ls -pF $* | mc"). The tools are all very simple and very general and very hacker-friendly as a result. If you assume that the output of any program might be the input of another, then you understand pipes, but if you call isatty(3), you are creating work: the features can't be generalized. The reason these programs have survived for fifty years is that they are practically elemental in a Unix-like environment (hierarchical filesystem, bytestreams, pipes): in a world with screws, you need a screwdriver, on a Unix-like system, you might need a lot of things to get around, but you still need most of the things that were invented in the 70s.Anyone writing a conventional program knows that if you're writing a function and it's got eight parameters, it should probably be several functions instead of one. It doesn't seem odd to them that the man page for GNU's ls is longer than the source code for Plan 9's, though! But that's how Unix works, that's how it's supposed to work: it's an environment for programming. So there's this divide between a user-friendly interface that doesn't expect you to write a shell script, and then an interface designed for hackers, with simple, predictable tools. You can't optimize for both cases, and you'll encounter constant friction in one if you are treating it like the other. Someone used to the GNU style will constant complain about the lack of readline support and no "--help" and someone used to the Plan 9 style will make the type of complaints you see on that page (namely that the typical $current_year Linux userspace is bloated and still doesn't do anything). "Friendly" and "helpful" are relative to the task you're trying to accomplish and the way you're trying to do it.