this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2026
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    This guy’s a real Upstart if you ask me (lemmy.world)
    submitted 1 month ago by cannedtuna@lemmy.world to c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world
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    [–] ICastFist@programming.dev 29 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Richard P. Gabriel, in his essay “The Rise of Worse-is-Better,” expounds on this theme (see Appendix A). His thesis is that the Unix design philosophy requires that all design decisions err on the side of implementation simplicity, and not on the side of correctness, consistency, or completeness. He calls this the “Worse Is Better” philosophy and shows how it yields programs that are technically inferior to programs designed where correctness and consistency are paramount, but that are evolutionarily superior because they port more easily. Just like a virus.

    The highest achievement of the Unix-aesthetic is to have a command that does precisely one function, and does it well (...) This philosophy, in the hands of amateurs, leads to inexplicably mind-numbing botches like the existence of two programs, “head” and “tail,” which print the first part or the last part of a file, depending. Even though their operations are duals of one another, “head” and “tail” are different programs, written by different authors, and take different options!

    From The Unix Hater's Handbook

    (I like Linux, but it's not all sunshine and rainbows)

    [–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

    "This program sucks because it doesn't come with the world's most confusing GUI and doesn't do a trillion things"

    If you ask this person what "technically inferior" actually means you'd probably get a different answer every day.

    [–] Viceversa@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

    GUI certainly has its place.

    [–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 2 points 1 month ago

    Yes and so do simple CLI tools that work. Head and Tail are about the worst examples because they work very well and also do very different things.

    [–] ICastFist@programming.dev 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

    But that's not what either of the guys complained about

    [–] qqq@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

    Yea what a hot take that was, critiquing words that were never there and then calling the person an idiot.

    [–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

    The head and tail programs also do completely different things. What differences in options do they have?

    [–] Viceversa@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

    Really completely different? Do they not print first / last lines of text from a file into the terminal?

    [–] LodeMike@lemmy.today -1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

    The way they do it is fundamentally different. Head just reads until number of newlines is the target number. Tail has to first read the entire file and keep a buffer of the file and/or offsets for each line ending to determine what the last 10 (or so) lines are.

    This idiot (Gabriel) probably thinks exclusively in the real world paper line analog.

    I also just looked at each program's command line options and they're identical. Less things only Tail can do (because they're fundamentally different operations)

    [–] qqq@lemmy.world 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

    This idiot (Gabriel) probably thinks exclusively in the real world paper line analog.

    Typical of Internet discourse to just immediately brand someone you disagree with an idiot... That "idiot" is one of the designers of common lisp, among other things. You're allowed to disagree with a smart person too you know

    [–] LodeMike@lemmy.today -3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

    OK. Designers of programming languages can be idiots.

    Lisp is a bad language IMO. Way too mathy. Nobody programs like that anymore for a reason.

    [–] Viceversa@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

    Programming language is a tool. Do you think there're no more tasks left where "mathy" programming language would be preferable?