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Comment by Pesthuf | Hacker News Reader

People new to *nix make the mistake of thinking this stuff is well designed, makes sense and that things work well together.

They learn. We all do.

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Coincidently I discovered the unix haters handbook today:

https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

"The Macintosh on which I type this has 64MB: Unix was not designed for the Mac. What kind of challenge is there when you have that much RAM?"

Love it.

I don't understand what they mean in that quote. Neither Unix nor the Mac were designed for that much RAM.

Judging from the context, the user interface was fine in the days of limited resources (a 16 kiloword PDP-11 was cited) but then modern computers have the resources for better user interfaces.

They clearly didn't realize that even more modern Unix kernels would require hundreds of megabytes just to boot.

What kernel takes 200 MB+ to boot?

OT ... I worked with Simson briefly ages ago. Smart dude. This book happened later and I've never seen it before. Small world I guess.

People new to *nix don't realize that it's a 55 year old design that keeps accumulating cruft.

Of course, but the same (with a bit lower number of years) can be said about Windows, or HTTP, or the web with its HTML+JS+CSS unholy trinity, or email, or anything old and important really. It's scary how much of our modern infrastructure hinges on hacks made tens of years ago.

One of the original demos showing off PowerShell was well structured output from its version of ls.

That was 17 years ago!

People new to the internet think alike. Still, not a day passes and we are once again reminded how fragile yet amazing this all information theory stuff is.

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