From: doug@cs.dartmouth.edu (Doug McIlroy)
Subject: [TUHS] Charles Forsyth on putting Unix on a diet.
Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2017 10:57:48 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <201710261457.v9QEvmqr013778@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> (raw)
As an admirer of minimalism, who has given talks that extol
Norman Wilson's streamlining of research Unix, I naturally
like Forsythe's thesis.
I noticed unintended irony in one more or less throw-away remark:
"It is dangerous to place too much hope in any improvement coming from just
following new fashions, if we lack insight into what really went wrong
before. Without that insight, I suspect that rewriting UNIX in C++,
for example, could easily become an excuse for increasing complexity
(because by using C++ `we can handle more complexity')."
Bjarne Stroustrup's avowed reason for building cfront, which
evolved into C++, was to have a tool for building an operating
system in object-oriented style. The tool took on a life of
its own, and arguably became more complex than the old-fashioned
Unix he aspired to improve on.
Doug
next reply other threads:[~2017-10-26 14:57 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 25+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2017-10-26 14:57 Doug McIlroy [this message]
2017-10-26 22:07 ` George Michaelson
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2017-10-28 13:11 Norman Wilson
2017-10-27 21:30 Norman Wilson
2017-10-27 22:49 ` Chris Torek
2017-10-27 10:36 Noel Chiappa
2017-10-27 13:03 ` Clem Cole
2017-10-27 13:23 ` Steve Nickolas
2017-10-27 21:51 ` Andy Kosela
2017-10-27 23:04 ` Larry McVoy
2017-10-27 23:15 ` Steve Simon
2017-10-27 23:39 ` Tim Bradshaw
2017-10-28 2:00 ` Bakul Shah
2017-10-28 2:34 ` Lyndon Nerenberg
2017-10-28 2:42 ` Lyndon Nerenberg
2017-10-28 6:38 ` Bakul Shah
2017-10-27 21:43 ` Dave Horsfall
2017-10-25 2:51 Dan Cross
2017-10-25 3:14 ` Larry McVoy
2017-10-26 17:27 ` Larry McVoy
2017-10-26 22:12 ` George Michaelson
2017-10-27 3:49 ` Steve Nickolas
2017-10-27 6:55 ` arnold
2017-10-27 7:30 ` Derek Fawcus
2017-10-27 9:44 ` David Arnold
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