It’s a pretty common quote from Introducing Regular Expressions (2012) by Michael Fitzgerald, used as a quip.

He he, recency bias, I guess?

It's from The Art of Unix Programming (2003) by Eric S. Raymond. It's actually in the first chapter. And the supposedly original quote is:

> Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.

> -- Henry Spencer Usenet signature, November 1987

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/philosophychapt...

Henry Spencer being: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Spencer . I imagine that's why the quote is also in that regexp book.

It's a super arrogant quote used, I'd say, 95% of the time by people who don't deeply know other OSes (besides shallow memes and jokes about them).

The general structure of the quip/aphorism/joke/snark pre-dates the industrial revolution dating back (at least!) to Edmund Burke's [1] "Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke

Sounds similar to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santayana

Looks like Burke lived a century+ earlier.

Yeah, I know, but the difference is that Burke was actually right :-D

LOL, I knew I knew the quote, didn’t remember from where and WikiQuote gave me that source. Should be corrected but I’m on mobile at the moment, I’ll do so later if no one does in the meantime. That’ll teach me to trust the internet.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Unix

TAOUP didn't make it famous: it was probably about as well known as it is now well before 2003. The cited Usenet post is real https://groups.google.com/g/sci.space.shuttle/c/L8-Upf8gZoY/... .

Even less recently, we have had a very similar sounding Greenspun’s Tenth Rule.

The Common Lisp one? Another arrogant and these days probably outdated quote that's sometimes trotted out on the internet.

I have seen more than one generation say this and then, after a while, attain enlightenment. Feel free to be the next one.

Programming languages are tools. Tools need to be used to build wonderful works of art or industry to be useful or have any realistic shot at being considered great tools.

The fact that the overwhelming majority of great applications, services, any kind of software we create is not written in Lisp should at some point in the first century after the creation of Lisp, lead Lisp afficionados to some kind of enlightenment, one would hope.

Unlikely, since it's already been 60 years, so they only have 40 years left.

> outdated

No, CL's popularity hasn't changed over the past 30 years.

Yes, you're completely right. The same people using in 1990 are using it today.

The OP had identified problems with the existing approach, and proposed a concrete solution in detail. Dismissing that with a pithy quote because it vaguely matches a common pattern is low effort and needlessly dismissive. The quote stinks anyway. Unix is not the pinnacle of computing.

Agreed. (MS-DOS may have “reinvented UNIX, poorly,” but there do exist other OS and other approaches to UI that enjoy a large and happy user base.)

Honestly one could argue that DOS has some merit beyond Unix. It’s simple command line interface expects users will program in other languages like C or assembly. It’s more directly interaction with the machine. Sure it had limitations like file name lengths etc back in the day, but I think many Unix shells are overly complex and ought to yield to more suitable languages like Perl.

Agreed in general, however shell languages (should) have a different focus, such as running processes.

There's been a few attempts at this, but I settled on the fish shell as it has a good balance and syntax highlighting for interactivity.

I still write simple scripts in sh and complex ones in Python however.

Many of the standard unix tools are not written in sh. They're written in C. Am I missing something in your comment?

> It’s simple command line interface expects users will program in other languages like C or assembly.

I think the point here is that DOS explicitly rejects the composition that pipes enable, in exchange for the ability to just hand "the whole system" over to a programmer.

DOS had pipes since version 2.0 I believe.

But the main point, that DOS was basically a thin program loader that "got out of the way" is sound. Think of it like a UEFI shell environment, with 640k+ limits.

Dos pipes were just writes and reads to temporary files. No parallel processes

Ok, but didn't concern the end user, as far as I can remember.