From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Mon, 23 Dec 2013 23:54:19 +0000 Message-ID: <20131223235419.Horde.Ld29eJHbaIBoe0oX_BOLhQ2@ssl.eumx.net> From: Kurt H Maier To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> References: <20131223182840.Horde.HuKfFKF2fZoroKVTFstUiw4@ssl.eumx.net> <20131223205159.Horde.iY9hvHuKffSBozksmDay4A5@ssl> <214e5e9f99e73a1094433938b5e1dc0c@pi.att> <18b8d3d0c6c2a261b2c805e625081143@ladd.quanstro.net> In-Reply-To: <18b8d3d0c6c2a261b2c805e625081143@ladd.quanstro.net> User-Agent: Internet Messaging Program (IMP) H5 (6.1.4) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed; DelSp=Yes MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Disposition: inline Subject: Re: [9fans] Adding a new user on 9-Front Topicbox-Message-UUID: a7557e26-ead8-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 Quoting erik quanstrom : > On Mon Dec 23 17:10:13 EST 2013, sl@9front.org wrote: > isn't this a false dichotomy? rudeness doesn't preserve value. Neither does gladhanding. > it's easy to point out past mistakes. do you think these were obvious > at the time they were made? Whether they were obvious is too subjective to determine. They were (often very loudly) recognized as mistakes. The problem, as usual, is that a well-funded mistake is far more likely to succeed than an impoverished masterpiece. Obvious? I'll never know. But people I respect decried lots of these decisions at the time they were made. Without getting into the chicken- and-egg problem of how I came to respect some of these people, in a lot of cases, stumbling across an angry netnews missive from a usenet address I trusted was catalytic in my process of coming to grips with some understanding of correct software design. The Unix Hater's Handbook is a collection of articles in this vein; there are systems eulogized therein which were displaced by the rise of unix, and whose passing makes me truly sad to have missed out on an era of computing with real diversity in system design. This is why harmful.cat-v.org is so important, and it's why I don't have any interest in suffering fools on internet mailing lists. If community is important in guiding software trends, it's important to nip encroaching macrocultures in the bud; otherwise we wind up with POSIX everywhere, and an entire generation of computer users who can't even conceive of a world without it. People like Blake can present me with bullshit about 'living in a cave' all day long -- but the surest way to prevent mistakes is to cause people to defend proposed change within an inch of their lives. That's the original point of a thesis defense, and the principal is no less valid on a mail list. Most people seem to take such challenges personally; this is just because they're not used to being challenged. It will pass. khm