A sign of the times

[pphaneuf]

As apenwarr is demonstrating, it seems linuxcentrism is the new vaxocentrism.

I find it especially ironic that he sees BSD as an "imitation Linux" when, historically speaking, it's the other way around. I won't argue that it's where it's at nowadays, but sometimes, the old fart knows a trick or two, still.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

In my defense, I know which one came *first*. But being first only gets you so far. The one currently trailing behind in usefulness either has to resort to imitating the leader, or trying to carve its own path forward. Certainly Apple's doing plenty of the latter... but not on the Unix side, only in their UI.

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

I suppose that's one of the reasons FreeBSD (which is Darwin's closest cousin) isn't taking over the world either. But I figure there's only so much you need on the command-line these days, it's a bit of a weird place to put the innovation at. Rock-solid jails like FreeBSD has had for a long time, or things like fs_usage (which I'd have given a body part to get while we were working on Weaver!) are pretty damned useful.

I'm a bit disgusted as well by the command-line environment, but it seems you can apt-get a bunch of better stuff with Fink, including find-utils and friends. Meh. I miss valgrind and ethereal way more.

And, dude, you really ought to get an LJ account, so you can get notifications, and so that I can be lazy and type apenwarr. ;-)

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

And also, just to be clear, I'm not being overly negative with my comment, just noticing what's happening. The world did, in the end, sort of turn into a VAX, eventually, with the x86. Who do you know, nowadays, who compares pointers with NULL instead of just testing them directly in "if" statements? But, but, but, there's these weird computers where "NULL != 0", your code will break on them! :-P