Rob Pike: Master Of All He Surveys

I suppose every field needs a few inadequate hangers-on. You know: the little kid in the corner who never actually did anything, but who made sure the water-bottles were full before the team went on the pitch. The fat kid on the phones. The skinny spotty kid selling tickets. That sort of inadequate person.

Rob Pike is apparently that sort of inadequate person.

You know the management suck-up at work whose sole job is to spend their life producing a meaningless scatter-graph? This “article” has one, re OSes.

You know the sort of person who comes up with Laundry Lists? Rob Pike is one of those, too. In ten years, to 2000, we as an industry came up with “Java, Perl (a little).”

Well, I’m all for Perl (rather less, please). But we also came up with Netscape! I mean, don’t be too rude to us!

And we stood by Unix, X, TCP/IP, and Emacs! (With a fork, obviously.) And hardware got ooooooh so much better!

Is Pike an ancient old queen, or am I missing something?

There was a claim in the late 1970s and early 1980s that Unix had killed operating systems research because no one would try anything else. At the time, I didn’t believe it. Today, I grudgingly accept that the claim may be true (Microsoft notwithstanding).

By whom? When? Where? And didn’t Microsoft (hem hem Apple hem hem BeOS hem hem Mach hem hem are you listening Pike you little tit) prove exactly the opposite?

Notwithstanding.

The holy trinity: Linux, gcc, and Netscape.

Oh, the Rapture. Who the hell cares about any single one of those three, apart from Pike?

Bruce Lindsay of IBM: HDLC ~= HTTP/HTML; 3270s have been replaced by Web browsers. (Compare with Visicalc and PC.)

Remember, kiddies, this was written in 2000. 2000.

3270s? Yup, I remember them. I also remember Commodore Pets. Both nice, in their way. But in 2000? 2010?

And I’m gonna finish with what I think is the ultimate quote (which of course makes it the quote to finish with):

Innovation? New? No, it’s just another copy of the same old stuff.

OLD stuff. Compare program development on Linux with Microsoft Visual Studio or one of the IBM Java/Web toolkits.

... OK, I’ll compare program development with all that.

What’s Linux “program development” done for us since 2000? And I’m not biased, neither. What’s IBM Java (Eclipse) done for us?

And what do you expect, Pike? A fucking miracle?

Get back to work and whizz one up for us, for God’s sakes. Stop whining. This “the dog ate my homework” crap doesn’t cut it in the modern age.

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And for those of a technical disposition: no, HDLC is not remotely an approximation to either HTTP or HTML.

I suppose you could consider it an approximation to TCP/IP. Well, IP, at least.

But to compare it to the Awesome Skillz of a cretinous stateless protocol supporting a bastardised descendant of SGML (for which T B-L is almost certainly due a Nobel Prize at some stage) is surely the mark of a worthless know-nothing idiot.