salmo

Yeah, huge early adopter of lex and yacc. Really drove the potential of pipes. He’d take half baked ideas and show Thompson, Richie, et al the real potential. Kicked off many late nights of their inspired work. Such a supportive human being, too.

I’ve been using awk for 20 years, and when I read his memoir I had a light bulb go off and really got it like I never had before. Such an amazingly powerful tool.

He’s an incredible writer. So many of his books have demystified things that were vague to me. I still read his papers that use real terminals, etc. because I always obtain some kind of mini enlightenment moment. The Unix Programming Environment is so great and the books he supervised like TCP/IP Illustrated by Stevens.

I keep the first volume of the latter on my desk to show “that’s not how that works.” Those diagrams <3.

The Kernighan thing is a kinda and a definitional problem.

No he didn’t work on the kernels or C. But he did work on awk and write a lot on top of roff that made Unix useful to Bell. It really started as a documentation system internally. Also he was the primary test driver of a lot: building tools with tools. I think he’s too humble about his work.

His memoir, mentioned by another commentator, is an amazing read. I highly recommend it.

Usually you can, but it better be worth it. You’ll have to get an officer to say they’re willing to accept the risk with a high level legal counsel.

If you tossed this idea up to that level, you’d piss the officer off for wasting his time and burn the relationship with the lawyer.

Also, this team was pretty infamous at that point for not playing nice with the corporate structure (eg naming the OS Plan 9). Sure, they were rockstars to nerds, but Unix, etc. never made Bell/AT&T real money. Wasn’t their fault, but they never got internal clout and were just a small, weird group in a giant company.

Was going to say the same. China was consistently in this state for most of recorded history, looking to past Dynasties for solutions to current problems. Or maybe more on point, the Yellow Emperor. Egypt had Horus in a very analogous role.

Your Roman and Hindu examples are spot on.

Progressive thought really is the exception and not the norm when I look at recorded history. You really only see it develop thematically as part of the Western Enlightenment. I think that primarily impacts so-called Western cultures, and in a sometimes contradictory way between sociopolitical and religious beliefs.

Caveat: I am not an expert in any of these topics. Just a hobbyist history/religion guy. I may be way off more thorough academic thought.

I still use the fool out of vagrant. I often have to write small tools that run across 10000s of servers running various versions of OSes (but all x86 these days, thankfully). Almost always I need to hit /proc, /sys, and various glibc versions, so having a full kernel and user space is better than fussing with Docker.

It lets me test against all of them pretty easily. Tear down, spin up, repeat.

I learned that various versions of RHEL6 kernels have stuff like epoll() but others don’t and it’s not everything after kernel version X.Y. Joy.

Better than before when I had to support HP-UX, Solaris, AIX, etc. At least I have a consistent shell and least common denominator tools. That was like old school browser detection.

But yeah, a lot of focus on doing work without stressing the machine at all to not impact business workloads. Not my “day job”, but get pulled into emergencies because folks trust that I’ll do it. Log4j2 detection/validation was not fun. That was a “real cli” with a degraded pure shell fallback. And due to the lack of predictably, that was a try, fail, degrade. Nested jars/wars/ears suck when you can’t just play in memory.

I run macOS with virtualbox locally, but can get all the Linuxes I need and quickly ruby/shell a test harness.

Only annoying thing is remembering to remove them all when I’m done to get that disk back.

This has a tech solution, but the same people problem. Look at the % that have “leftist” in the description. Again, politics come before interest just like the existing sites.

I decided to still look. There seems to be no interest-based community. Just random posts likely interesting to an existing group of friends.

It would be fun to stand one up for like gardening, fishing, sewing, or another of my random hobbies. But I’m admittedly lazy and don’t want to own that (both $ and effort managing a community).

I enjoyed niche subreddits until each devolved into feuding, politics, or just repetitive “how do I start” questions killing the signal:noise. The commercialization of Reddit was well after my disinterest.

Seems weird it doesn’t seem to integrate with any TSDB that I can see quickly skimming the site. Maybe I missed it or maybe “home lab” doesn’t mean what I think it means.

I have junk emitting metrics from systems and sensors all over my house to InfluxDB (usually via telegraf) and thought this might be a more fun alternative to grafana.

Oh, good point. When pv sees the actual file vs stdin, it can give % progress without hints. Which is nice.

And it’s nicer that the recent ‘dd status=progress’ (if I remember that option right).

Sorry, that came off snarkier than I meant rereading it.

You’re 100% correct. I’ve grown more tolerant of these ceremonial uses. There really aren’t many folks that understand shell. I see it in CICD, etc all the time, too.

The one left that kills me that I see in vendor scripts all the time is ‘command; ret=$?; if [ “$ret” -ne 0 ]; then foo; fi’

If you’re handling return code cases, then cool. But folks don’t realize ‘test’ aka ‘[‘ is just another command.

But then again, so much Java, etc. I read is the same copy/paste. Those can be worse because example code isn’t prod ready, where bad shell usually does the right thing, just awkwardly or inefficiently.

But as you point out, so much isn’t thinking about what you’re doing, just mimicking.

It’s funny (given that the name likely is inspired by Useless Use of ‘cat’) that examples here have actual useless uses of ‘cat’. ‘cat file | pv > disk’ can just be ‘pv < file > disk’.

But whatever. I’m sure 90% of code stems from something someone read and copied or came most easily to them. It works.

‘dd’ was really useful for finicky media like tapes and doing EBCDIC translation. It’s still great when you combine bs and count. Blow away an MBR, make an xGB file, etc.

It’s a Swiss Army knife. It can do a lot, but isn’t the best tool for most things. I still love it. Probably just muscle memory.

That’s a good point. These days you likely don’t have to worry about device codec support and space limitations like I used to.

I used to have a whole workflow of rip to FLAC, import metadata then fix it, then a script to convert. I overengineered as usual, I’m sure.

Funny how people complain about Apple dropping devices, but this has hung around so long. Thought it was dead years ago. Real use would have been a fake phone for kids.

I see so many bemoaning streaming. Your iPhone can store far more music than an old HDD iPod. Don’t see the difference.

I mostly stream with Spotify. It recommends good obscure music for me, and I can find most of the weird 70s/80s punk I love.

I still have my old records and use them when I want that captive experience. I kept my CDs of super obscure local bands.

For me it’s not an xor, but an and. I like both the new and old experiences. And I still listen to albums more than songs.

The streaming sound quality isn’t nearly as cringe inducing as old MP3s. I’m no audiophile, but hated MP3 less than barely compressed. That crunch on the high end was brutal.

I don’t miss maintaining ripped CDs: fixing metadata, keeping FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, and MP3 for different devices, etc. Never bothered recording my records. I’ll never understand anyone longing for cassette tapes beyond personal mix tapes.

I do still pay for records when I love an album just to kick them more $. But they mostly just go on the wall or collect dust in a bin. I usually only listen to my old LPs.

I think nearly all Linux distros did this when they adopted systemd. That’s where I first read this argument.

I know RHEL, Debian, and Arch do. Not a lot outside of those families.

I slowly ran out of use cases for a "home server" as everything moved to "the cloud" (hand wave), streaming and Apple took most of it away. Keeping a static IP for mail and web got more expensive that Google Apps for Domains & Netlify.

Now I just have a RockPro64 with a 256GB SSD I had lying around running InfluxDB and Grafana. You do need 4GB of RAM and a disk for this and the RockPro64 is better and more available than a 4GB Pi 4. Seriously love that thing.

My Netgate router streams metrics to it. I have a Raspberry Pi running the Ubiquiti management software for my APs and monitoring my UPS with nut. Telegraf is easy to work with extending. I do need to scrape metrics from the Ubiquiti APs eventually.

Every once in a while I mess with some other little ARM board and environmental sensors, but that's it.

No fans. Less power than my kids' tablets. Just Ansible for config management and keeping them up to date.

I’m mostly an infrastructure guy. I mostly fix C or identify bugs, and write integrations in Go or Python.

But I spend probably 50% of my time dealing with production problems due to this in Java business applications.

Nearly every client library in the Spring ecosystem has the worst of all possible defaults, and all internet code examples are “look at how easy X is” without anything around making it real.

Devs chuck code out without HTTP connection pooling or pipelining requests, let alone reasonable timeouts. Hikari has an awful default DB pooling config, and on and on. Inevitably it gets reported as “latency” when a quick look at [APM tool] shows all the time is spent waiting on a connection, or a stack trace shows which library chucked the timeout.

And often devs just bump connection pools higher when they see a bottleneck and there’ll be 1000 idle connections wasting DB resources and not helping the problem (inefficient query, missing index, etc).

I complain because the defaults here are masochistic. But there does need to be a cultural change where using a client or server library assumes a tuning exercise. And yeah, good testing would be great too.

There are no 1-size-fits-all values. You have to look at the use case and the SLOs of the app and it’s up and downstream dependencies. You don’t want optimizing a config in isolation to break a larger system either.

Software development is hard. It requires understanding. No language or library can solve that for this stuff. I just wish all of these libraries’ docs called that out up front vs projecting plug and play. It’s all there, but buried in the godoc for you to have to know what you’re looking for. Others are worse.

This is especially the case with http libraries, since it’s usually building a client or server object/whatever correctly and not just a config tweak you can slap in at 2am.

And back to the original point, when there are 12 implementations that can mean having to relearn this activity for each one. That said, if I’m using Go, that usually means building something with net/http and handing it to the library to use instead of the default. Other languages without that base layer baked in don’t get that advantage.

Back to Java/Spring: usually Catalina vs netty/Reactor Core are 2 totally different worlds and often dev teams don’t know which they picked or that they switched when they generated a new project and pulled their code in from Spring Boot 1.5 to 2.x.

It's a big deal because a) they never fixed it and b) you have to replace the whole top half including the touchbar, etc. Mine died twice under 3 years of Apple Care and is going out again now. I don't like the short key travel, but that's such a tiny detail to me. The 4 USB-C ports are fine with me except the external video compatibility is such a flaky mess.

I'm stuck using this "cool design" as a desktop now because it costs ridiculous money to repair. And I get to flip my monitor on and off twice to get it to come back from sleep.

This is my 4th macbook pro. Previously, I had 1 battery problem in my first 2008 model and it was replaced at the Apple Store same day. My old macs ran until the batteries finally swelled years later. They weren't just sleek and cool, but super high quality and amazingly sturdy.

The other thing that stinks is that the issue wasn't something accountants did to save some bucks, but a design feature that cost me more.

I'm honestly only buying an M1 because I know that they've left the sexy-at-the-expense-of-the-customer approach.

I think Ivie sans Jobs got too focused on design and not customer experience. Apple made excellent hardware before Ivie, and likely will after. Just maybe not as many fashion shows.

Pretty cool for me. I was looking to use the kindle for a dashboard for some metrics. I really want it to start up and "just work" and not have to mess with the browser every time.

I like the idea of framing an eInk display on the wall, but don't want to buy one when I have unused Kindles.

Between this, some stuff I wandered into there, and a raspberry pi or whatever, it looks totally doable. May fall back to a TUI, but whatever.

I think the “in principle” is the problem.

The tech isn’t the principle. The experience is. Use the right thing for for the audience. Use a GUI, use a TUI, use a basic CLI tool for day-to-day. And sometimes that can even be additive where more than one is the right answer.

The clicks stuff in this does feel silly to me. But I think that sometimes there’s value in not reaching for a mouse.

If you care about the tech in principle, then I think the answer is to work on a library/framework you love, like they did, vs a user app.

I’m not reinventing those wheels, and will borrow stuff like this when it seems right. And anything is better than curses :).

Ugh. This whole thing is exhausting because everything is so oversimplified (as is any conversation on the topic) and there isn’t a right answer.

You can’t compare the architecture of VSCode, vim, emacs, VS, IntelliJ, etc. and come to any conclusion.

They are completely different tools, built at different times, with different goals, by different (dis)organizations.

Emacs was a bunch of primitives that were wrapped in Lisp, and you could do anything. It was a day 1 goal. Ignoring the things that evolved to become normal in the Lisp on top is weird. It was extensible by design and completely open ended, with packages evolving to being part of the expected toolchain.

Vim took vi and bolted on some scripting interface that kept being pushed, adding extensibility by demand.

Now we have neovim embedding lua which is more emacs-like, and driving vim features as well. But it got to add higher level “primitives” because it’s a new implementation.

IDEs like VS, Borland X, Sun Studio, etc. were purpose built tools for a specific toolchain package. Only after the fall of traditional IDE/RAD environments did VS start trying to be an everything IDE.

Eclipse and Netbeans started as Java IDEs in Java, were all focused on architecture, and enabled plugins. People started making plugins to support all the languages (and then totally break the IDE by installing the wrong combo). As eclipse, well eclipsed, NetBeans you started seeing Eclipse “distros” of canned plug-in combos to not implode. I know folks with an eclipse install per codebase they work on.

IntelliJ got the architecture part from Eclipse, but stayed very hand curated like the old RADs and IDEs. You can install all the things in IntelliJ Ultimate or buy the more focused language specific ones (PyCharm, CLion, etc). The plugins are less flaky because they’re predominantly 1st party. The language specific ones make each toolchain ergonomic like a traditional IDE.

VSCode got the benefit of being the newest. Strip down below an “IDE” but above a text editor exposing primitives. Use web tech so the kids can make stuff because Java isn’t the lingua franca it once was. It could look back for a better sweet spot.

So whatever. Use what you find productive and comfortable.

I wander between probably 10 languages. I tend to have an editor and terminal side by side. It’s comfortable for me. I prefer the editor+ experience more than the integrated IDE one. I also am generally mouse-adverse. But that’s me and I’m not “right.”

I like my neovim acting like VSCode more than VSCode acting like vim. But it’s because it matches what my hands do already. When I do !!fmt or whatever and it doesn’t work, it takes me out of my flow. And when editing remotely, I still get vi/vim just without bells and whistles so my hands still work. Many just never have that use case.

That comes at a cost of maintaining a crazy config for me vs clicking for plugins. It used to be 10-15 vim plugins. Now it’s more LSP + a few. But I revision control it and revisit every 6 months or so. That trade off’s worth it to me, maybe not to you.

Some folks still love their full IDEs with tighter integration with a toolchain and language-specific features ergonomically placed. They likely use Java/C#/C++ and have to dabble in html+js at times.

Use and make what you want. Make an LSP or don’t. Integrate them into something or don’t. All of the experiences described in the article still exist. No one has to use any of them. Follow your heart (or I guess your hands). Saying one is best is like saying some kind of shoes are best for everyone. They’re tools, but ones we live in. Wear what’s comfortable.

In the words of a song by Sheryl Crow that I don’t particularly like “If it makes you happy, then why the hell are you so sad?”

This reminds me of 1998. I was in college and working at a mid sized business replacing a dumb terminal system on a VAX with a nice NT based GUI. I mocked the TUI. So antiquated running off a minicomputer.

We rolled out the PCs and updated software and salespeople’s and CSRs’ productivity was killed. They could fill in the screens on the old system before it finished painting.

The new one had the same “screens”, but flipping to the mouse and back was awful. A year later the vendor finally got everything straight with the keyboard (tab order, hot keys, etc). But it still took longer to render and blocked input and was generally awkward.

I set them up with telnet on their PCs back to the VAX. New folks found the GUI easier, but experienced users still hated it.

Eventually the vendor required moving the DB off the VAX and the TUI was dead.

I had started building web UIs by then. Thick clients were already becoming passé. But that experience really has stuck with me.

The tech you use doesn’t actually matter at all. Enabling people to work faster, better, easier is what matters.

Sometimes a short-term but steeper learning curve is better in the long run. Sometimes ease of adoption is more important. And sometimes the tech doesn’t change the fact that a tool just sucks.

Good tech becomes an extension of human ability. I love vim and awk. I’d rather write documents in troff or LaTeX w/ git. But I also love Pixelmator and actually even outlook these days. I feel awkward without them.

Interestingly, as I type this, I can’t think of a single web UI that I have that unconscious relationship with.

I found one in England from PiHut and had it shipped here a few months ago. But it was DOA. Their return process is that I have to ship it back and they might refund me for that.

I just ate it. So if anyone wants a Pi 4 w/ 2GB of bad SDRAM lemme know. I may just see if I can reflow the chip to fix. But I’m pretty terrible with hot air + smd, so I’m hesitant.

I really wanted the 4GB model to run monitoring software for my home network, etc. anyway. So I got a RockPro64 and I love that thing.

When I looked you could still get a 3 easily, which would be fine for this. It runs on a teensy too apparently, so it doesn’t seem the 4 helps in any way. Given it runs on a 2 means it’s just 32bit. You can probably still find a 3 easily.

I haven’t enjoyed an image editor as much since Photoshop 5 in the 90s. Both the old Pixelmator and Pixelmator Pro have been commercial software I really felt like I needed and want to buy.

It feels modern and natural on macos. It’s pretty sophisticated, but the feature set I use is easily within reach and it’s intuitive to me. Modern Photoshop is an awkward behemoth. The GIMP has always been functional but painful.

The newer stuff like workspaces for different types of editing seemed odd, but I do flip between the illustration layout and photo layout and enjoy that.

I like the price for the software. It feels very reasonable to me and brings me back to the feeling of supporting developers’ work.

Adobe is so expensive and invasive. It just feels abusive. I also pay for Omnigraffle, but it’s high enough it feels like a burden vs supporting developers.

I am not a professional and just use it occasionally for design, documents, and personal photos. I thought I’d share that, since it colors my view.

I agree with the UI stuff and soft deletes. It was a lesson I learned about 7 years ago when I had users make some tragic mistakes in a system I made. “Are you sure?” doesn’t do anything more than a hand wave CYA. Showing the consequences does.

But then this starts sounding like a guy who went to the same bank for 30 years, knows the tellers, and doesn’t understand why they won’t give him a small business loan.

If you started a company, rely on GitHub for core infrastructure, why would you not pay for it? And if you did this, why would you expect them to do support outside of self-service? Open Source doesn’t mean charity-worthy anymore. Most “successful” projects are either spun out of or spearheaded by a business these days. And it’s not like GitHub is rolling in profit. Their enterprise offering is just starting to get traction under MS.

I think the complaints would be more valid if they were outside of the norms in this space. GitHub + MS is still 1000x less shady than Sourceforge. I don’t think you’d see different behavior from GitLab et al.

To the real politik-like view: this experience won’t make you (or many others) move elsewhere or pay for the service. So it’s ultimately a 0 consequence situation outside of a blog post and some community discussion.

I’m general, I don’t love pieces of software or companies. I’ll wear free t-shirts to mow the lawn, not with pride. I don’t love GitHub, but I dislike it less than the alternatives, partly because it’s just the easiest. I think most are in that camp. Oktocat lost his street cred long ago.

I took typing in HS on these. Sadly the trackballs were almost always worn out or gunked up. The paint program was pretty painful because of it in elementary school.

We didn’t have any programming classes, just a room full of them for typing class, with the server in the closet.

F F F space H H H space. Ugh.

You could wander the menus of the word processor and actually dial the modem. We got endless joy from calling Pizza Pizza and hearing an annoyed voice coming from the closet.

We shared one dot matrix paper and my friend and I just split the odd and even pages and print twice because the teacher would let us listen to our walk/discman when we were finished and I really wanted to listen to The Bends.

So I guess I did learn a bit about programming :).

You do remember the hell that was the font tag, don’t you?

I think a lot of confusion from HTML being used for UIs vs hypertext documents. It’s a natural evolved mess still balancing the two.

But style should apply to the applied representation, while HTML should represent the intent of the content. The line is fuzzy, and HTML/CSS has a bad history of what falls where.

The cool thing with browsers is that we can bake in style to support multiple representations at once: monitor, mobile, printer, etc. Using the style attribute directly is mostly a side effect of only targeting the browser. Although your example of relative units is more ambiguous. Using a proper tag to represent the intent or falling back to a class where HTML lacks one would be preferable.

I think the separation makes more sense if you’ve used other document systems. SGML or XML DocBook, LaTeX, ROFF, etc.

For the last, if I use the man or mandoc module, all the man page norms are there for me and I’m just plugging in the content with the right macros.

W/o, I’m manually flipping registers all over the place.

But I’ve never hear of a roff or LaTeX UI, so…

They remixed the singles, really making them more “radio friendly”. Compressed, polished, and out of whack with the un-remixed “lesser” tracks.

The punk folks around Nirvana were surprised with how pliable they were with Geffen. Albini was pissed and wanted his name off of it.

He wasn’t easy to work with. Abrasive, rude, rigidly principled. He’s mellowed out with age, but really hasn’t touched much major label stuff since the 90s, if any.

If you listen to the original mixes on the reissue you hear how much more consistent it feels as an album. And I won’t lie. I have a bias. I love the quality of Albini’s work. Crisp and raw and uses the whole spectrum. And those drums…

Jesus Lizard, early Pixies, this album, PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me are more well known work he’s done that is great. Bush was awful. His band Shellac w/ the mentioned Bob Weston is f’n incredible.

These days, he works a super reasonable flat rate and will record anyone. Had friends who recorded at his Chicago studio. Brilliant guy.

Came to say the same. The vast majority of these were superseded by new products or their feature set was absorbed by other tooling. Back office was one of the worst examples. It became baked into Windows Server except Exchange.

I’m no fan of MS, but they tend to err on the side of overextending support and backwards compatibility. I would have killed Works 10 years before they did.

And some of these are just failures. I still have my MS Bob floppies, but come on.

I can’t choose an option where the terms may change in the future.

And that “combined software has to be GPL” isn’t OK with me. I’m just not happy with the GPL from a legal and philosophical stance. Totally recognize I’m weird and pedantic there.

But yeah, not wanting to debate my personal choices, more speaking to how the licensing decisions may impact the business success.

Making money w/ an open source product or really any library these days as your business’s product is hard.

It’s hard to sell, commercially “extend”, or sell professional services around. I don’t envy the situation. It’s hard enough for RedisLabs, MongoDB, etc. who have more opportunities there.

The FSF party line is that it isn’t anti commercial and the GPL is copyleft, not viral.

But you know…

But dual licensing has been around for decades and I’ve never heard them oppose it.

In practice here, no commercial licensee will want to maintain a fork. All improvements are in the OSS version available to any GPLed software.

Bold move not adding the LGPL or other more open license for a library. I get it. They want it used for OSS or get paid. But I think that limits the user base and therefore its appeal to folks who would actually pay for it.

It really will need to provide a superior technical product and more efficient dev experience like Qt did before Gtk "caught up" and forced the Qt license change.

If I'm a company, I'd rather use something I could hire folks who have experience with it unless it met those criteria. This is a crowded space, unlike "modern" X11 GUI frameworks at the time of Qt/early KDE.

From the look, there's no real differentiation here from the rest of the crowd. Maybe they'll hit that. As a big company, I'd pay for "support" for both that aspect and for input into the direction of the product. My big company does this for most OSS. But I don't do GUI dev in real life.

I won't ever use it personally because:

a) I won't pay for it for a hobby project. I'm probably going to go actual native and just hit 1 platform and do native on another if there's demand. If I'm going cross platform, I'm just going to do what everyone does these days: hit the web and forget about "native." Then use something clunky like Electron if I managed to be successful and folks wanted a local app.

b) I'm not going to license any OSS I make w/ the GPLv3+. Personal preference. Maybe enough people will disagree for them to get a user base.

It's a shame. I wanted to like it just because I love the band Slint.