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    ky3 avatar ky3 4 years ago | link | on: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Unix Legacy

    For a ranty take on Unix, see “The UNIX Hater’s Handbook”.

    “Everything is a file” makes for lots of leaky abstractions.

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      SeanTAllen avatar SeanTAllen 4 years ago | link

      one of the problems with unix is that everything isn’t a file.

      plan 9 provides a the same interface for everything, something you can’t say for unix. i don’t think we’ve used plan9 enough to say whether its abstractions are particularly bad.

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        ky3 avatar ky3 4 years ago | link

        one of the problems with unix is that everything isn’t a file.

        Indeed. I don’t understand why Plan 9 pushes further in that direction.

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      ky3 avatar ky3 4 years ago | link | on: Great Principles of Computing

      This may be a more canonical site (Denning occasionally teaches at George Mason):

      http://denninginstitute.com/pjd/GP/GP-site/welcome.html

      Noteworthy is the anthropomorphism in a 2002 assignment for a course exactly on the subject:

      http://denninginstitute.com/pjd/cs491/ASSIGN/a5.html

      (2) Give an example of an action loop that occurred in your life recently. How many action loops do you participate in every day?

      (3) In ordinary discourse we say that one person made a request of another. In computer discourse we also say that one server made a request of another server. What distinguishes the human request from the computer request?