To be fair, he’d probably have appreciated it.
Back to business.
Unix and C’s direct and spiritual descendants cannot be counted said Tim Burke, vice president Linux engineering at Red Hat. Well, in the absence of a Georg Cantor or a Kurt Goedel, let’s stop right there, shall we?
Unfortunately the man is too garrulous.
... but include Linux, Android, Mac OS, iOS, JavaScript, C++, the genius of the internet, and a planet of developers.
Or none of them, as you please.
The major impact of UNIX is not so much in the elegant code itself but rather in the culture of sharing work across industry and academia that became UNIX’s hallmark.
Just as well, considering the obvious inelegance of the UNIX code. Let alone the obvious inelegance of the Linux “me too” code.
But, there’s more! Matthias Ettrich, founder of KDE, had this to say in 1996:
The idea is NOT to create a GUI for the complete UNIX-system or the System-Administrator.
For that purpose the UNIX-CLI with thousands of tools and scripting languages is much better. The idea is to create a GUI for an ENDUSER. Somebody who wants to browse the web with Linux, write some letters and play some nice games
Ta, Matthias, that explains a lot. Other than the total absence of Linux games, that is. Or, well, almost anything other than a browser and a rubbish email client.
Or then, there’s Apache and OOo:
We congratulate the LibreOffice community on their success over their inaugural year and wish them luck in their future endeavors,” Apache stated. “We look forward to opening up the dialogue between Open Document Format-oriented communities to deepen understanding and cease the unwarranted spread of misinformation.”
Durn that misinformation. Also the increasing irrelevance of it all.
This past week, Subversion hit its 1.7 releaseadding new features that are supposed to help improve developer efficiency.
The release is also a stepping stone toward the future include of some Git style fork and merge capabilities.
I just can’t wait.
It’s [Beefy Miracle] a bit absurd, sure, but make no mistake about it, there was a very concerted effort to get this name. Beefy Miracle failed to win the support it needed from the Fedora community for Fedora 16, which is the first time the name was put forward. Fedora 16 which is due out in November is codenamed, Verne.
The puns around the Beefy Miracle are just starting to get going, with the promise of a Fedora release that Linux users will relish.
Relish.
I see what you did there.
Dear Lord.
Comments
http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/sh/mac.h
Here is all I need to say. Elegance of the “Pure C” in the original Bourne “Turing Complete Again” Shell sources.
Please tell me that is not genuine.
Please tell me that is a joke.
EBNF be damned!
Rather interestingly, btw, I note that Mr Bourne regards Truth and Falsity in exactly the same way that BCPL regards Truth and Falsity.
Or, in other words, the exact opposite of the way that C regards Truth and Falsity.
Some legacy, that.
Reference http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/bcpl.pdf.
Sometimes one should never look back.
“The major impact of UNIX is not so much in the elegant code itself but rather in the culture of sharing work across industry and academia that became UNIX’s hallmark.”
This code is … elegant? head exlodes
Btw, about the sharing thing – wasn’t you supposed to buy the unix code from your unix vendor? I recall reading something like that in the unix haters book. Allthough I read that Ritchie also sent tapes with the code away.
“The idea is NOT to create a GUI for the complete UNIX-system … blah blah”
Isnt Unix CLI based, because Unix was designed in the days of teletypes and character based video display terminals, not because “[t]he idea [was] NOT to create a GUI for the complete UNIX-system”? You know, before you could set a value for a single pixel on the screen? Wasn’t X added as an afterthought?
“We congratulate the LibreOffice community …”
What this shi- again? Yesterday my girlfriend went in a local store to print some documents (.doc) and complained to me that the printed copies looked nothing like she expected. Well, it turned out the store was using libre office, which craped on the document formating. I see libre/oo made a real progression.
And that’s why professionals don’t use OOo (and siblings). I mean, the idea of a professional using the Gimp is absurd, but you could just about sell a cheapskate on OOo, which sort of does the job usually. Sort of, usually, is good enough for a lot of people (a mate of mine uses it to publish the parish council newsletter, for example).
For a print shop, however, it is an insane proposition. It’s not just a question of losing one customer. Depending on how chatty and/or pissed off the customer is, you could lose dozens.
I’ve often wondered about “code elegance,” btw. There’s a degree of human interaction in this, but not as important, I would suggest, as the attitude of the compiler.
Since every Gnu project I have ever configure-make-make-installed spits out literally thousands of warnings (some of them quite scary), I would definitely suggest that the Gnu part of Gnu/Linux is sadly lacking in elegance…
... and bear in mind that this is with a compiler specifically built for it.
“It’s not just a question of losing one customer. Depending on how chatty and/or pissed off the customer is, you could lose dozens.”
A happy customer will tell maybe one person how great you are.
A pissed-off ex-customer will tell at least ten people not to go anywhere near you.
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