strangest systems I've sent email from

On Wed, 27 Apr 2016, Liam Proven wrote: Well, that's mighty big of you Liam. You are clearly a brilliant guy with a storied career and bristling with skills I only wish I had. As I read through your post here, I also got a lot more grit and understanding of why folks get as irritated as they do when I associate my bumbling college profs with something like LISP. It's silly of me to associate a language with a group of people. It's human, but still not very bright of me. LISP certainly has a lot of smart people advocating for it. It seems to represent a lost ideal or paradigm to them and it's I can see it's nasty of me to step on that, even if that's not my direct design to hurt them. I share your lament. One thing that also keeps jumping out at me over and over is how I meet people with the same kind of experiences you describe and they are often much more skilled and better critical thinkers than folks I know from my generation or younger. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of young shining stars, but they just don't seem to occur with the same frequency. I have surmised that I am standing on the shoulders of giants going all the way back to folks like Grace Hopper, and that it's more and more difficult to grow in this field in the same way as the "old timers" (which for me is anyone who worked in the industry before 1989, I realize it's all relative). All "you guys" seemed to start out with math or EE background and filling in the CS parts seems to be trivial for you. I look up to your generation, believe it or not. I'm a bit sad those never caught on in the states. They are neat machines. For me, as a teen in the 1990s. I associated Unix with scientists, engineers, and "thinkers" in general. I'd walk into somewhere to fix a monitor or printer (I was a bench tech for a while) and the Unix guys wouldn't want me near their stuff. They could fix it themselves and they didn't want some punk kid who knew MSDOS to touch them. Meanwhile all the people I didn't respect (PHBs and other business-aligned folks) used beige boxes running DOS. I knew I was in the wrong place. Wasn't that kind of true, though? I've heard it said "C is nothing more than a macro assembler". I'm a C programmer as you might expect. I'd heartily agree. However, being a C programmer I also see C's warts. It's not big on syntactic sugar, but it does get the job done in a straightforward and pragmatic way. I do plenty of OO in other languages, but I still prefer procedural & structured coding techniques most of the time (as long as it effectively solves the problems). However, I'd reach for an OO language or heavily abuse callbacks in C if I needed to do a simulation. I still like to show non-coders how all these OSX library calls often *still* start with "ns" (next step). It reminds me of the famous statement "Those who do not learn from Unix are doomed to re-invent it... poorly." Windows 10 inclusion of bash seems to me to be a white flag on the part of Microsoft saying "You guys were right." Especially after pushing Powershell so hard. Of course, I'm sure the devils advocate would say "It's just a greater diversity in a massive constellation of functionality in Windows" A very weird one. Most of my Unix zealot friends use Macs now. I still use the console :-) If I must, then I'll use fluxbox in X11 on top of NetBSD. Go VMS. I hope VSI can pull it off. I also hope they change their licensing terms to be less draconian. IMHO, that's what hurt them so badly in the 90s after Ken Olsen left. They wanted to LMF license every little bit of Tru64 and VMS. There is the hobbyist program, yes. However, you don't need to mess with that to download Linux, and that's still an accessibility gap. In order to prevent your goose that laid the golden egg from losing her value (as a dead or emulated goose), you need to kill the goose hunters. :-) Color me weirdo and rounding error since I mainly use NetBSD. It doesn't change the truth of your statement, though. :-) IMHO, C is the most portable language in the world, not Java. IIRC, many java runtimes are still written in C. Anytime someone makes a new processor one of the first things they do is port a C compiler, making a lot more stuff possible. I started learning and using Perl until all this weirdness happened and they bolted on OO etc... I'm not anti OO but it was all just too much more me. I bolted to Ruby and Lua. No disrespect to the Perl Monks, I just couldn't hang anymore. I mostly agree, but I would like to say a few things about security issues and C. * Buffer overflows and string format exploits are the biggest side-effects, security wise. They aren't nearly as common as they were. There is greater awareness among programmers, compilers, and scanning tools now (valgrind, rats, etc). Plus the exploit writers have found more fertile ground in things like SQL injection and CGI interfaces. * They are pretty easy to prevent most of the time, especially if you care enough to check or use something like stack-smashing prevention in your compiler. Also thinks like OS heap randomization has made exploits much harder. * Yes, they still happen, and still *can* happen, so I don't dispute that. I think this is some phrase I often throw around a little too cavalier. Just because a language isn't popular doesn't mean I can't learn something It boggles me, actually. There were some awesome Delphi coders out there. I thought they'd never be derailed, because they were actually *very* effective coders I'd seen really powering certain businesses. Did Borland hork things up or what ? And amazing things like Amoeba, Sprite, MOSIX and others have also sort of dried up and died on the vine. There were some great ideas there. I also get that things are lost in this type of "war" the merits and interesting side of LISP machines etc.. It's not a good thing. Hmm, was that before or after things like Desqview came along? I'd probably guess that's why or just the momentum DOS had for a while. Which was hard to believe for me, too. It must have been a cost thing. Folks could have had an Amiga, ST, Acorn, Mac, OS/2 (depending on how far back), a low-end Unix box, etc.. However, I guess ultimately people wanted whatever they could go to their local software shop and get software for. It still is a mystery to me why DOS was so popular. I know, man, there is no accounting for taste. Now, as you also allude to, they have started to copy Windows. Linus seems to have shifted his attitudes greatly. Check out what he says about GGI then what he says about Systemd: From: http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=89089527200744&w=2 "I don't see the world in black-and-white. I don't actually like Linux-only features unless they have a good reason for them, and I really like Linux to be a "standard" system " -Linus 1998 " I'm distrustful of projects that do not have well-defined goals, and well-defined interfaces. They tend to bloat and do "everything" over time. This is what gives us horrors like GNU emacs and Mach: they don't try to do one thing well, they try to do _everything_ based on some loose principle [..]" -Linus 1998 Now fast forward to 2015: "I have to say, I don't really get the hatred of systemd. I think it improves a lot on the state of init, and no, I don't see myself getting into that whole area." -Linus 2015 I'll leave the readers to decide if that's hyperbole or there is something real there. It'll probably split right down the fracture point with systemd haters vs advocates, I suppose. It still seems pretty emblematic to me. My theory is that once folks woke up to the potential the Internet had for improving their real lives, they didn't care how much they polluted the computing world to get access to that power, and they weren't about to abide having to learn anything new if they didn't have to. My personal opinion is that though those devices might give devs a taste of *some* of the power of Unix, none of those devices show the *user* any of the so-called "Unix philosophy" (KISS, everything is a file, etc..). What's also sad is that those users don't give a hoot. However, I'm not really surprised. I grew up in an era when computers were NOT cool for kids. If you liked them or wanted to play games on a computer, that made you a "nerd" or "geek" when those words were purely pejorative. Now those same people can't look up from their phones long enough to keep from falling down stairs, walking in front of subway trains, or uhh.... living. I still carry a Symbian phone since I find both Android and iOS so invasive and annoying. It's a strange shake up on the world I grew up in. Plan 9 is still being (very slowly) developed. Ken is still involved last I heard. Right there with you, Liam. Someone posted today about the good parts of the Internet that we got with the deal. Massive communication and documentation are truly positive side effects for the most part. However, I suppose I have mixed feelings, nonetheless. Yes, and even though there is *more* overall documentation on the Internet, the docs you get with hardware and tools are nowhere near as good as they were in the 80s AFAIK. Nobody ships manuals with source code and schematics. The last I saw of that was BeOS and The Be Book. Well, when it comes to that front, I've been in this business for about 20 years now, and I don't understand those efforts. I see that and I can better appreciate where you are coming from when you couch it this way. Only the good die young. "Some will rise by sin and some by virtue fall." -Shakespear I completely understand. I am sorry for associating LISP with some crappy experiences I had in school 20 years ago. You and other folks come from a noble tradition. It was wrong of me to scorn that, even for an unrelated reason. -Swift