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> nobody seems to be calling for that to die.

There is the Unix Hater's Handbook (http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf).

However, Unix doesn't suck half as bad as web development. Web development keeps a lot of problems alive that have been overcome in Unix development and everywhere else.



Yeah, there is, but it's ancient and that sort of carping seems to be a distant memory.


That's kinda the problem, though: Unix really is worse than VMS or Lisp Machines, when measured on certain axes (and I love Unix!); rather than fix it, or replace it with something even better (e.g. Plan 9), the computing industry has instead decided that POSIX is the end-all, be-all of OS evolution, and collectively ignored all the ways that life could be better.

It's very difficult, as I get older, not to survey the computing landscape and be profoundly bitter about our absolute and utter refusal to use better tools in order to achieve greatness. It's like people choosing to eat McDonald's when they could have an affordable home-cooked meal prepared for them, for essentially the same cost.


This is what makes me focus more on Windows, macOS and the mobile OSes.

Because these systems moved beyond what plain POSIX means.

Even on Apple and Google's OSes, their UNIX underpinnings are not that relevant, because most of the user space libraries and APIs don't have anything to do with UNIX.


Windows has its own legacy baggage and I wonder about the proposition that the mobile OSes' Unix underpinnings aren't relevant. Depends on what you're doing, I'd think.


Windows might have its own baggage, but with Windows 8 they have brought the original design of .NET from the ashes and assuming the current path is to maintain, those of us that like Windows will have a nice OO ABI alongside safe languages compiling to native code.

All the mobile OS relevant APIs don't have anything to do with UNIX.

All the Objective-C, Swift, Java, JavaScript, C++ APIs available on those OSes don't depend on being implemented on top of an UNIX kernel.


>alongside safe languages compiling to native code.

Which ones do you mean? F#, ..., ???

>All the Objective-C, Swift, Java, JavaScript, C++ APIs available on those OSes don't depend on being implemented on top of an UNIX kernel.

Interesting point.


I mean .NET Native and the lessons of Midori finding their way into C# 7+ and C++/CX, alongside with emphasis on the C++ Core Guidelines, which started at Microsoft before Bjarne got involved.


I mean, I like C#, but that stuff seems to me to be sitting several levels above the OS anyway.


Because most likely you never spent time using or learning the technical details of the OS developed at Burroughs, Xerox, ETHZ, DEC, MSR,....

Also I didn't mention just C#.


I just mentioned it because I'm familiar with it and I am excited about the .NET Core stuff letting you use it in more places.


Ah, then you should check Joe Duffy posts about Midori and his talk at InfoQ.




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