On Thu, 25 Feb 2021 at 10:07, J Martin Rushton <
martinrushton56@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> On 25/02/2021 14:49, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> >
> >
> > On Thu, 25 Feb 2021 at 09:13, J Martin Rushton via CentOS
> > <centos@xxxxxxxxxx <mailto:centos@xxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > On 25/02/2021 13:37, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> >
> > I was recently looking at Raymond's book "The Art of UNIX
> Programming"
> > from 2003. He, along with contributors Thompson (inventor of UNIX),
> > Kernigham (C and AWK), Korn and others of that callibre, espouse
> > creating "little tools" that do one job reliably and well. The
> > likes of
> > Gnome or systemd certainly would never fit into this philosophy. I
> > really think we have lost a lot of maintainability and ease of
> > management over the last 20 years as applications are stretched to do
> > ever more.
> >
> >
> > Maybe but everytime someone says "I think these are too complex" they
> > then turn around and say "but I really need this to do this one more
> > thing." Also the complexity of tools is generational. The oldschool
> > 1970's Unix people were screaming that the 1980's software was too
> > complex because various flags had been added to central commands. The
> > 1980's people complained that even early Linux was too complex because
> > it had so much more software that depended on each other. And so forth.
> >
> > In the X11 world, there were as many people saying FVWM was way too
> > complex when twm was all you needed and it was making software too hard
> > to build. BUT could you get twm to work on our new monitor which has a
> > different view screen feature that made the fonts look like crap.
> >
> > The counter argument I heard from a 1970's Unix era person was "Software
> > gets more complicated over time as we find that more problems need to be
> > solved. You either keep up with it, or get out of software." He was
> > working in software until his death a short while ago in his 80's.
> >
> > --
> > J Martin Rushton MBCS
> > _______________________________________________
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> > https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
> > <https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos>
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Stephen J Smoogen.
> >
> The irony being that moving to UNIX I had it drummed into me that the
> one tool-one job ethos was a great advance upon the rigidly defined and
> integrated monolith of VMS. Oh, and that was in the 1990s.
> --
> J Martin Rushton MBCS
>
And everyone I worked with told me that Unix was a poor reinvention of
TSX-11 where you could get real work done. But since VMS came out over a
decade after Unix, I can't say Unix is an advance over VMS.
In any case this is devolving into the 4 Yorkshiremen skit so I am done
here.
--
Stephen J Smoogen.
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