12 Dec
2011
12 Dec
'11
5:18 a.m.
On 12 December 2011 04:25, Alexander Schreiber <als at thangorodrim.de> wrote:
No, it is not just you. I'm sure there are plenty of people who just can't
really grok Unix. As well as people who just love it. ;-)
Fortunately, there is room for both of them.
Indeed!
The thing that I like - which used to cause protests, but it appears
to be fading now - is that after some 2 decades of busy, rapid
open-source Unix development, it is now getting to the point where it
is approaching the degree of user-friendliness of the best commercial
systems. In some areas, it's ahead; in some, behind. But it's getting
there, even when this is over the protesting howls of the Unix
old-timers.
--
Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
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On Sun, Dec 11, 2011 at 02:23:14PM +0000, Liam Proven
wrote:
Well, that's true, but until the 1990s, it was primarily a commercial
product, no? The one that influenced everybody most, and got licensed,
was AT&T, mainly System V, not BSD, is that not so?
IIRC, Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, SCO Unix and UnixWare, OSF/1 etc. all
contained SysV code? (Even if not the kernel.)
And AT&T wasn't very cooperatively-developed!
On 10 December 2011 21:45, Jochen Kunz <jkunz
at unixag-kl.fh-kl.de> wrote:
Yes, Unix evolved, among other things, as a tool hacked on by the folks
that where actually using it. And in those days, those weren't exactly
graphics designers, english majors or musicians. So it was build and
improved by programmers, sysops, researchers and so on to be a useful
tool for what they were doing. On Sat, 10 Dec 2011 19:23:54 +0000
Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
Yes, absolutely!
A friend who rented a room off me for a couple of years wa s the first
to say this to me. I would often go to him with Linux problems and
queries and it took him quite some time to wrap his head around the
idea that I was powerfully averse to scripting and coding. It is very
alien to the Unix mindset, which is, yes, by programmers for
programmers. This makes it sometimes very unfriendly to
non-programmers. I think writing a small program to do what would
take a single command
on almost any other CLI OS I have ever used illustrates my point
rather well...!
Yes. And this is no surprise, given that Unix is an OS programmed
by
programmes who wanted a nice environment for programming. :-) As this
particular friend said to me: "it is only now that I am
starting to understand how /deeply/ bizarre some of this stuff must
seem to you, as a non-programmer!"
Hehe. If you are in the programmer/systems engineering mindset, it is
all perfectly logical and is in fact an incredible powerful tool. If you
are not ... well, old, bearded men mumbling incomprehensible things over
boiling and smoking cauldrons come to mind ;-)
BTW: A
friend of mine knows all and everything about Windows. But he
simply can't wrap his mind around Unix. Just like you.
:?D Hurrah! It is not just me!