invsblduck
You must not be that curmudgeonly! I haven't tried Wayland yet, and so long as people are still arguing about it, I'm too afraid to even try it. :-)
It's never been like that. What you wrote is fundamentally the same idea as: "If consumer computers more like consumer computers, you could buy a MacBook Pro and run RedHat Linux on it, then run any of the macOS applications or Linux applications that exist in the world."
While the mobile computing ecosystem and details are quite different, it's mostly same cocktail of things: Commercial hardware that is either open or closed, a [maybe commercial] OS, and applications that execute under version X of the OS and version Y of a runtime.
i've used ansi sequences in my zsh prompt for 20 years to make colors and move the cursor; it's just in-band ascii that is interpreted by the terminal emulator, no?
I said the same a decade ago. As of last week, I'm back on X11... chipping away at configs for hours and hours and hours.
But I have libnotify popups now. :D
It differentiates between TABs and Spaces because each one signifies a different thing to follow: Lines starting with TAB indicate that a _recipe_ follows (which is shell syntax), and lines NOT starting with TAB indicate that a _rule_ follows (ie., native Makefile grammar/syntax).
Hate it or not, it's been a reliable workhorse for decades.
> My first burnout was pure depletion of energy. I was young, passionate, and believed in doing the best work I could. I was addicted to work and pushed myself to deliver. I did, and built a career. I left after almost a decade at that company [...]
(However, I never found a way to leave "Tech" for another profession--especially once I achieved a certain salary range, and others depended on me.)
> I can’t shoot the shit and talk strace or gdb with any of them.
Know the feeling exactly...
moral of the story: 99% of people still don't understand the nature of software. very few people--like rich hickey (clojure), or fpb (mythical man-month)--seem to get it. tech is mainstream and most people are missing historical context and experience.
(the goals of capitalism are typically at odds with building systems of the highest quality--and understandably so.)
the only creative spark in computing i have to sooth myself anymore is reading lisp or unix books from the 80s and 90s, because the content is so thoughtful (given the culture and smaller community at the time). the internet has become ruined by advertising and bloatware, and the culture has largely been ruined by bad habits and misunderstanding, imo.
You also have resources like The Unix Heritage Society [2], who show a timeline of historic events on their wiki [3].
I bought Brian Kernighan's memoir [4], which so far is an incredibly detailed and personal account of his time at BTL.
[1] http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/
[3] https://wiki.tuhs.org/doku.php?id=events:start
[4] https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/d...
While this may be your experience, the mechanism of FIFO pipes in Unix (which is filehandles and buffers, basically), is an old one that is both elegant and robust; it doesn't "randomly" fail due to unreliability of the core algorithm or components. In 20 years, I never had an init script or bash command fail due to the pipe(3) call itself being unreliable.
If you misunderstand detailed behavior of the commands you are stitching together--or details of how you're transiting the network in case of an ssh remote command--then yes, things may go wrong. Especially if you are creating Hail Mary one-liners, which become unwieldy.
Thank you for the cool ideas!