Re:Your computer is a distributed system
by Karrot_Kream on Wednesday March 30, 2022 @12:47PM
(#30857693)
The UNIX philosophy made more sense as an abstraction for a computer when computers were simpler. Computers nowadays (well at least since 2006-ish) have multiple cores executing simultaneously with complicated amounts of background logic, interrupt-driven logic, shared caches, etc. The UNIX philosophy doesn't map to this reality at all. Right now there's no set of abstractions except machine code that exposes the machine's distributed systems' in a coherent abstraction. Nothing is stopping someone else from writing a UNIX abstraction atop this though.
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Re:Your computer is a distributed system
by generalizations on Wednesday March 30, 2022 @01:32PM
(#30858279)
The idea of doing one thing, and doing it well, isn't dependent on the simplicity of the underlying system (I imagine that PDP-11 systems seemed impressively complicated in their time, too). The UNIX philosophy is a paradigm for managing complexity. To me, that seems more relevant with modern computers, not less.
> “A program is generally exponentially complicated by the number of notions that it invents for itself. To reduce this complication to a minimum, you have to make the number of notions zero or one, which are two numbers that can be raised to any power without disturbing this concept. Since you cannot achieve much with zero notions, it is my belief that you should base systems on a single notion.” - Ken Thompson