From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@imsi.com>
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 95 06:07:58 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: alt.religion.your.operating.system.sucks
In-Reply-To: <199501300522.VAA17151@jobe.shell.portal.com>
Message-ID: <9501301407.AA23479@snark.imsi.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



I'd have replied in private mail, but Mr. Embarassing here can't be
reached by mail...

anonymous-remailer@shell.portal.com says:
> Well, maybe unix gets its reputation for being hostile because of
> things like 
> 
> * many commands don't work fully (find, for example)

Haven't found a bug in find since '85.

> * a large portion choke on input that isn't "expected"

Such as?

> * many more do extremely poor input checking,

Such as?

> * the configuration files are bizarre

Yup. Shell scripts as the startup scripts for the machine are really
hard to understand. The simple list of newsgroup names to configure
the news readers are impossible to grok, too. Not.

> * different version have command with different options (stty
>   everything, ps -ef vs. ps -aux, etc.)

And of course, DOS has never added options to new versions of the system.

> * each version is slightly different (ever try porting a non-trivial
>   program?

Yup. Recently, I ported about 80,000 lines of code in a day. It wasn't
much of a challenge -- because I knew how to program, of course. I had
to hack some compatibility libraries, and it took about another day
and a half to back-patch the original sources so that the program
compiled without problems on both architectures.

>   Hell, look at the "config" program that comes with PERL - 80K of stuff
>   to build a make file for the flavor of UNIX you are using!)

Thats because its fully automated. Would you prefer to do the job by hand?

Remember, Unix handles things that PCs never even dreamed of -- like
endianness considerations, which you don't get if you are chained by
the ankle to one shitty processor.

> * the commands don't combine well (often uuencode + sendmail ==
>   garbage)

I've never seen that, but then again I'm just on drugs. Naturally, of
course, no DOS programs have ever crapped out.

> * many commands accept a slightly different regular expression syntax
>   than the shell does

The shell doesn't accept regular expression syntax, so this shouldn't
be the least bit suprising.

> * the commands aren't built with ease of use in mind.  For example, to
>   kill a process under unix requires that I know it's process id.

Not at all true -- you can use skill, or if a process is a current job
you can do stuff in most shells like

kill %procname

> > ever hear of X windows?
> 
> X-Windows is an extreme pain to get working.  Sure, if you buy your
> unix workstation the manufacturer will pre-install it.  Just try
> setting it up from scratch.

So buy it precompiled. Lots of people sell it that way. I can't
imagine that Windows would be easy to install if you got it in source
form.

.pm