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   Hailey (hailey@hails.org)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Jan-2024 05:37:26 JST Hailey

   there is a certain originalist leaning among unix people where they believe that unix was a perfectly conceptualised design from the beginning, and that all we need to reach unix nirvana is just do things more like we used to

   of course the reality is that everything is informed by the realities of its time, and computing these days looks nothing like what it did 20, 30, 40 odd years ago. keep what's good, chuck out what isn't

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     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Jan-2024 05:37:24 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     @hailey POSIX has done a really good job of tracking which interfaces actually have value for writing long lasting portable applications and which were relics of their time that should be treated as implementation details and replaced freely by systems implementors, but too few ppl appreciate this, and lots go arbitrarily trying to replace perfectly good things everyone agrees on with their own new inventions not informed by the mistakes of history...

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     Hailey (hailey@hails.org)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Jan-2024 05:37:25 JST Hailey

     in reply to

     the corollary to this is that we have a much better understanding of the domain now.

     we scoff at terrible old APIs like libc's gets, but at the time we just didn't really know better. now we do, and it's easy to see why an API like that can't be fixed and shouldn't be used.

     by the same token, it's unlikely that more complex constructions like an init system or build system from back then is really all that fit for purpose today. we have more suitable conceptual models for understanding and solving the problems we work with now than we did back then

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     Chris Siebenmann (cks@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Jan-2024 05:39:18 JST Chris Siebenmann

     in reply to

     @hailey As someone who has looked at various aspects of Unix V7, I have to laugh sadly at the people who think that Unix's early versions and early designs were the platonic ideal and everything went downhill from there. But I suspect most of those originalist Unix people are imagining some golden past.

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