this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2024
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unix_surrealism

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the temporality of an era (lemmy.sdf.org)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 37 points 2 months ago (1 children)

cat -vconsidered harmful

[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 months ago (2 children) 
Bell Laboratories

Murray Hill, NJ (dec!ucb)wav!research!rob

It seems that UNIX has become the victim of cancerous growth at the hands of
organizations such as UCB. 4.2BSD is an order of magnitude larger than Version
5, but, Pike claims, not ten times better.

The talk reviews reasons for UNIX's popularity and shows, using UCB cat as a
primary example, how UNIX has grown fat. cat isn't for printing files with line
numbers, it isn't for compressing multiple blank lines, it's not for looking at
non-printing ASCII characters, it's for concatenating files.

We are reminded that ls isn't the place for code to break a single column into
multiple ones, and that mailnews shouldn't have its own more processing or joke
encryption code.

Rob carried the standard well for the "spirit of UNIX," and you can look
forward to a deeper look at the philosophy of UNIX in his forthcoming book.
[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Yeah there are some pieces of code that are super bloated in the FOSS community. I think it does not help overall because it mixes the primitive meaning for an application. Such as systemd or even GCC. I'm starting to like much more simple designs like GNU Shepherd. Or the idea of having a Hurd like kernel (which does not need to be Hurd). Or shifting to more simple CPU ISAs. Designs should have the necessary entropy, not more not less. Trying to allocate more stuff in a design does not help.

I think some part of the GNU community is starting to understand that.

Emacs is bloated? Probably more than it should be. Maybe it should be more minimalistic and move most of it to modules. But is LEGO bloated? Emacs can be regarded bloated because how it is shiped, but not for what it is. Not being modular and programmable would make Emacs not Emacs.

This is a topic very interesting to touch but probably not to talk about it in a comment section hahahha.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Rob carried the standard well for the "spirit of UNIX,"

if (isatty(1)) {

	if (ioctl(1,JMUX,0) >= 0) {
		struct winsize win;
		if (ioctl(1,JWINSIZE,&win) >= 0) {
			screenwidth = win.bytesx;
			if (screenwidth == 0)
				screenwidth++;
		}
	}

	qflg = Cflg = 1;
	(void) gtty(1, &sgbuf);
	if ((sgbuf.sg_flags & XTABS) == 0)
		usetabs = 1;
}