>Functional + universal data structure + homoiconic = power
It everything used TSV or tabular data, yes. But is not the case. With lisp you can always be sure.
>I edit my entries in Emacs.
Emacs can do dired (ls+vidir), eshell, rsync maybe to s3 (emacs package+rclone), markdown to HTML (and more from ORG Mode) and tons more with Elisp. With ORG you can basically define your blog and with little of Elisp you could upload your blog upon finishing.
>21st Century Terminal
Eshell, or Emacs itself.
>. What if we take the idea of Unix programs as pure functions over streams of data a little further? What about higher-order functions? Or function transformations? Combinators?
Hello Elisp. On combinators, maybe that shell from Dave from CCA. MPSH? https://www.cca.org/mpsh/
emacs -q --script "foo.el"
(/ 2.0 3.0)
(princ "Hello")
(terpri)And while you have libraries and code access, elips is easier than the unix way (writing c/go/rust/… programs or bash/perl/awk/python/… scripts). Except for few cases.
Depending on how you want to look at it it is possible to say that Emacs editor you use when you first install it is just the default application for the ELisp machine. This is why people talk about things like Org-Mode as if it is this separate thing. It kinda really is. Sure it is included with Emacs nowadays, but it really is just another Elisp application. And, yes, it is a editor first and the machine is based around concepts like buffers, but it is still a full fledged programming environment.
Which also means that if you don't like Emacs as a editor you can write your own. Which people have done. It makes a great Vi/Vim editor with Evil that is far more compatible with Vim then most people imagine. I use "Meow-mode" which is another model editor that adopts some more modern approaches from things like Helix and puts a lot of focus on improving the efficiency of Emacs keyboard macros.
So saying that Emacs users just have a "Emacs-shaped hammer" makes as much sense as saying that all Java authors have is a big Java hammer or that Linux users can only see problems as Linux nails, or whatever.
There is a downside to all of this, of course.
Emacs where-everything-is-changeable-and-accessible-all-the-time doesn't lend itself to multi-threading, so if you have a lot of stuff going on in the "background" it can cause performance problems. The newer "native compilation" that became standard in the past few years does helps a lot, but there is a still a single thread deep down.
Also if you want to get very productive in Emacs there is a learning curve. If you are a sysadmin type that has been using Vi for decades then going to Emacs is going to be very painful. The best bet for becoming a advanced user very quickly is to learn just enough Emacs to do basic editing and navigating info files... and then just put the effort into learning Elisp. You don't have to do this, lots of people use it for years without learning any real elisp, but it does limit you. Of course thanks to things like Doom Emacs you don't lose much compared to other editors/IDEs.
Also things like Eshell and GNU Calc are criminally underrated and misunderstood. (hint: Eshell is not a terminal emulator and doesn't use a external shell program, so don't confuse it with things like ETerm)
And, hey, I can now have conversations with my editor with the help of ollama. So there is that.
>It everything used TSV or tabular data, But is not the case. With lisp you can always be sure.
basic unix kit is built around line-separated lines which are field-separated and you even get to choose your own separators and not get locked into tab. You can use this kitset, a common one, or other different kit. But with this kitset, yes, everything is indeed a table
Re: emacs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urcL86UpqZc&t=253s
Perl used to have an AWK to Perl converter because most of the language could be mapped 1:1 to Perl.
UPE would be fine under 9front save for sh (rc) and make (mk).
Well, sometimes Perl DBI. But the young seem to learn Python about the time they get their drivers' licenses, and some unfortunate among them will inherit my code, so these days I use more psycopg or cx_Oracle (the latter now superseded, yes).
> You really can use the best tool for the job. I've got Bash scripts, awk scripts, Python scripts, some Perl scripts. What I program in at the moment depends on my mood and practical considerations.
If you use something like Emacs, you just handle s-exps.
I take a somewhat hard line that scripts and terminals are for executing sequential commands naively only. Call it "glue". If you're writing a program, use a higher level programming language and parse things properly.
This problem of course does tend to turn up in higher level languages but at least you can pull a proper parser in off the shelf there if you need to.
Notably if I see anyone parsing CSVs with cut again I'm going to die inside. Try unpicking a problem where someone put in the name field "Smith, Bob"...
It did not immediately succumb to envy of the Korn shell.
How do you tackle this? Would you count the numbers of commas in each line then manually fix the lines that contain more fields?
paragraph titled DSV style. (Yeah esr, not a fan, whatever...)
Csv sucks no matter what, there is no one csv spec. Then even if you assume the file is "MS Excel style csv" you can't validate it conforms. There's a bunch of things the libraries do that cope with at least some of it that you will not replicate with cut or an awk one liner.
Well-defined structured data formats, formal grammars, and parsers exist for a reason. Unix explicitly eschews that in favor of the fiction of "plain text", which is not a format for structured data by definition.
Shells that implement advanced objects and error handling cannot sink this low, and thus the embedded realm is not accessible to them.
advanced objects and error handling do not require tens of kilobytes of machine code. a lot of why the bourne shell is so error-prone is just design errors, many of them corrected in es and rc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rc_(Unix_shell)
https://wryun.github.io/es-shell/
They are alternative shells, both from the 90's I believe. POSIX was good in some ways, but bad in that it froze a defective shell design
It has been acknowledged as defective for >30 years
https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2019/01/18.html#slogans-to-exp...
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es shell is heavily influenced by Lisp. And actually I just wrote a comment that said my project YSH has garbage collection, but the es shell paper has a nice section on garbage collection (which is required for Lisp-y data structures)
And I took some influence from it
Trivia: one of the authors of es shell, Paul Haahr, went on to be a key engineer in the creation of Google
"A lot of effort was made to keep ksh88 small. In fact the size you report on Solaris is without stripping the symbol table. The size that I am getting for ksh88i on Solaris is 160K and the size on NetBSD on intel is 135K.
"ksh88 was able to compile on machines that only allowed 64K text. There were many compromises to this approach. I gave up on size minimization with ksh93."
20 years later we had 64 KB to fit an whole OS and applications on home computers.
Lisp Machines required a 80M disk with at least 512k of memory.
Neither Smalltalk nor Lisp fit in 64k in 1980 (~20 years later). Even the IBM 7094 which ran a very tiny Lisp (1.5) had around 32k 36bit words.
Also where did I on my comment mentioned Lisp Machines?
You are purposefully confusing multiple decades of computing. Smalltalk was much later, and required quite large machines, so did Lisp when it became popular on machines like the PDP-10 and ITS which had much more memory, just running Macsyma was a PITA.
Also now we are getting MMU and page loading into the argument?
Here he goes again with another application I didn't mention at all.
Your claim that Lisp and Smalltalk didn’t have the luxury of 80k when they got invented, when intact they did. Much of the programs that ranusing Lisp specifically was VERY memory hungry.
Now your just arguing for the sake of arguing and just being antagonizing. Have fun.
Then, in 1983, there was a version of Lisp for ZX Spectrum (which had 48k of RAM and no floppy).
There was also Rosetta Smalltalk:
> ROSETTA SMALLTALK now runs on the Exidy Sorcerer computer! It requires 48K of memory, a disk, and CP/M.
First version of Unix had a 512k disk pack, and no shell -- that 80k binary for shell would have been a dream.
"20 years later we had 64 KB to fit an whole OS and applications on home computers." is quite the claim when we are talking about Unix, Lisp or Smalltalk and comparing them to CP/M with DOS which .. does nothing in comparison, and ignoring literally all other aspects of a computer system.
That's pretty bad, but isn't the complete lack of support for structured data an even bigger one? After all, if you can't even represent your data, then throwing errors is kind of moot.
Garbage Collection Makes YSH Different (than POSIX shell, awk, cmake, make, ...) - https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2024/09/gc.html
You need GC for arbitrary recursive data structures, and traditionally Unix didn't have those languages.
Lisp was the first GC language, and pre-dated Unix, and then Java made GC popular, and Java was not integrated with Unix (it wanted to be its own OS)
----
So now you can do
# create some JSON
ysh-0.23.0$ echo '{"foo":[1,2,3]}' > x.json
# read it into the variable x -- you will get a syntax error if it's malformed
ysh-0.23.0$ json read (&x) < x.json
# pretty print the resulting data structure, = comes from Lua
ysh-0.23.0$ = x
(Dict) {foo: [1, 2, 3]}
# use it in some computation
ysh-0.23.0$ var y = x.foo[1]
ysh ysh-0.23.0$ = y
(Int) 2- JSON denotes a data structure, but it is also text - you can use grep and sed on it, or jq
- TSV denotes a data structure [1], but it is also text - you can use grep on it, or xsv or recutils or ...
(on the other hand, protobuf or Apache arrow not text, and you can't use grep on them directly. But that doesn't mean they're bad or not useful, just not interoperable in a Unix style. The way you use them with Unix is to "project" onto text)
etc.
That is the layered philosophy of Oils, as shown in this diagram - https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2022/02/diagrams.html#bytes-fl...
IMO this is significantly different and better than say PowerShell, which is all about objects inside a VM
what I call "interior vs. exterior"
processes and files/JSON/TSV are "exterior", while cmdlets and objects inside a .NET VM are "interior"
Oils Is Exterior-First (Code, Text, and Structured Data) - https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2023/06/ysh-design.html
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[1] Oils fixes some flaws in the common text formats with "J8 Notation", an optional and compatible upgrade. Both JSON and TSV have some "text-y" quirks, like UTF-16 legacy and inablity to represent tabs
So J8 Notation cleans up those rough edges, and makes them more like "real" data structures with clean / composable semantics
You can almost always represent one format inside of another. I can put JSON in a text system, or I can hold text in Protobuf. That doesn't mean that the systems are equivalently powerful, or that a text-oriented system supports structured data.
> on the other hand, protobuf or Apache arrow not text, and you can't use grep on them directly
This is kind of tautological, because of course you can't grep through them, because Unix and grep don't understand structure, because they're built around text.
> IMO this is significantly different and better than say PowerShell, which is all about objects inside a VM
Why?
any data can be represented as text
The greatness of unix is that none of the intermediary programs need to know that they are dealing with an image. This kind of simplicity is impossible if the type of your data must be known by each intermediary program. "Structured data" is often an unnecessary and cumbersome overkill, especially for simple tasks.
Unix is my favorite OS.
I like that it's fundamental unit of work is the process, and that, as users, we have ready access to those. Processes are cheap and easy.
I can stack them together with a | character. I can shove them in the background with a & (or ^Z and bg, or whatever). Cron is simple. at(1) and batch(1) are simple.
The early machines I worked on, processes were a preallocated thing on boot. They weren't some disposable piece of work. You could do a lot with it, but it's not the same.
Even when I was working on VMS, I "never" started new processes. Not like you do in Unix. Not ad hoc, "just for a second". No, I just worked directly with what I had. I could not compose new workflows readily out of processes.
Processes give a lot of isolation and safety. If a process goes mad, it's (usually) easily killed with little impact to the overall system. Thus its cheap and forgiving to mess up with processes.
inetd was a great idea. Tie stdin/stdout to a socket. Any one and their brother Frank could write a service managed by inetd -- in anything. CGI-BIN is the same way. The http server does the routing, the process manages the rest. Can you imagine shared hosting without processes? I shudder at the thought.
Binary processes are cheap too, with shared code segments making easy forks, fast startup, low system impact. The interpreters, of course, wrecked that whole thing. And, arguably, the systems were "fast enough" to make that impact low.
But inetd, running binary processes? That is not a slow server. It can be faster (pre-forking, threads, dedicated daemons), but that combo is not necessarily slow. I think the sqlite folks basically do this with Fossil on their server.
Note, I'm not harping on "one process, one thing", that's different. Turns out when processes are cheap and nimble, then that concept kind of glitters at the bottom of the pan. But that's policy, not capability.
But the Unix system is just crazy malleable and powerful. People talk about a post-holocaust system. How they want something like CP/M cuz its simple. But, really? What a horrific system! Yes, a "unix like system" is an order of magnitude more complex than something like CP/M. But its far more than an order of magnitude more capable. It's worth the expense.
Even something weak, like Coherent on a 286. Yea, it had its limitations, but the fundamentals were there. At the end of the world, just give me a small kernel, sh, vi, cc, and ld -- I can write the rest of the userland -- poorly :).
No need to say "would". You can have exactly this experience today using gnuplot with sixel terminal.
A real improvement would be for some form of ipython to support in-terminal sixel graphics. There is no real technological impediment for that.
But short of a massive overhaul and in spite of the shortcomings the current system still _works_ better than any other platform.
I would like to see unix stay relevant for the long-term however. It's possible these shortcomings lead one day to a the trade-off against newer systems not being worth making, or being just incompatible.
What would this interoperability look like, in practical terms?
For example, how would you invoke a program in language A from language B, other than the typical existing `system.exec(...)'.
Whereas Unix functions (programs) can be invoked by any programming language.
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The C ABI would be a second place, as many languages can interact with it.
The criticism of the file system as overly simple or archaic is often been made, ever since the 70s. However the fact is that it IS use-able as a base for ACID capable software. Numerous reality based evidence attests to that.
I remember in Rochkind's book[0] there is a quote criticising Unix being inferior to IBM's MVS because it didn't have locking. As Rochkind retorts, MVS didn't either! Not as a kernel feature, but via user space software, which is eminently do-able in Unix too.
[0] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/advanced-unix-programmi...
How about [1] and [2]?
My language has those because its first program was its own build script, which requires calling out to a C compiler. It had that before printing to stdout.
Turns out, that made it far more powerful than I imagined without a standard library. Calling out to separate programs is far better than a standard library.
[1]: https://git.yzena.com/Yzena/Yc/src/commit/95904ef79701024857...
[2]: https://git.yzena.com/Yzena/Yc/src/commit/95904ef79701024857...
However I think the counterpoint is maybe a programming analog of Doctorow's "Civil War on General Purpose Computing"
I believe the idea there was that we would all have iPads and iPhones, with content delivered to us, but we would not have the power to create our own content, or do arbitrary things with computers
I think some of that has come to pass, at least for some fairly large portions of the population
(though people are infinitely creative -- I found this story of people writing novels their phone with Google Docs, and selling them via WhatsApp, interesting and cool - https://theweek.com/culture-life/books/the-rise-of-the-whats... )
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The Unix/shell version of that is that valuable and non-trivial logic/knowledge will be hidden in cloud services, often behind a YAML interface.
And your job is now to LLM the YAML that approximates what you want to do
Not actually do any programming, which can lead to adjacent thoughts that the cloud/YAML owners didn't think of
In some cases there is no such YAML, or it's been trained out of the LLM, so you can't think that thought
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There's an economic sense to this, in some ways, but personally I don't want to live in that world :)
There will always be a demand for skilled labor, but the definition of "skilled" is going to continue changing over time. That's a good sign, it means that the field is healthy and growing.
A large percentage of the current software workforce, professional and open source, are people who learned these skills casually growing up rather than explicitly in school as a career. I'm not sure this demographic exists in any meaningful numbers in younger generations.
Will there be enough people to maintain our foundations when the only ones who understand them are the ones formally educated? What happens to the actual number of people even interested in a computing career path when they didn't grow up with "classical" computers?
I am happy to be totally wrong here, it's just the kind of thing that keeps me up at night.
I guess whether you think this is real or not is a similar question to whether you think the iPad/iPhone thing is real
Did that happen, or not? (honest question)
The irony is that if it did happen to a certain person, that person won't notice it
Personally I do think it's very real, because thoughts are correlated with what's "ready at hand", what you can accomplish in an environment
But I can't recall a discussion of how they affect us. The tools we use, the techniques those tools allow and foreclose, profoundly shape our thoughts and feelings. This applies to any creative practice (I'm not one of those "code is art" people, but you are creating something), not just software.
I think I share your worry, but in a more abstract sense: how does the act of thinking about building software shape us, and what would we lose without it? Would we be better off? Would it have been better if we applied those mental resources elsewhere? Has society benefited from a huge swell of humans thinking this way?
Something that heartens me a little is that I think the rich world is on the cusp of being able to do things broadly only because we want to. I may never write another Django app again, unless I want to experience how they did it in the early 21st century. I think this culture is emerging--I wish it were more widespread, and we were more focused on bringing it to all humanity, but its emergence gives me hope.
s/YAML/JCL/g
s/LLM/clone and edit/g
And you've pretty much described the mainframe world.
For this reason, one of the things that AT&T thought to do back in the 70s with its new OS, Unix, was to give it to their engineers as a more sensible interface with which to write programs for, and submit jobs to, the mainframe. The version that was built for this purpose was called PWB/Unix (for Programmer's Workbench).
"Write programs that do one thing and do it well" and "Write programs to work together" are good ideas, too (unfortunately many programs don't).
I think that using a text stream for everything is not the best idea though. In many cases binary formats will do better. I think XML and JSON are not that good either.
I think "cache your compiler output to disk so you wouldn't have to do a costly compile step each time you ran a program" is a good idea, although this should not be required; REPL and other stuff they mention there is also very helpful.
They say the file system is also old. My idea is a transactional hypertext file system. It doesn't have metadata (or even file names), but a file can contain multiple numbered forks and you can store extra data in there.
(Transactional file system is something that I think is useful and that UNIX doesn't do.)
They are also right about the terminal is old, although some of the newer things that some people had tried to do have different sets of problems.
They also say another unfortunate thing is layering, and I agree that this layering is excessive.
Interoperating without needing FFI is also helpful (and see below what I mention about typed initial messages, too).
About the stuff listed in "Text streams, evolved", my idea of the operating system design, involves the "Common Data Format" (which is a binary format, somewhat like ASN.1 BER but different), and most data, including the command shell and most files, would use it; this also allows for common operations.
I agree with "a program which displays all of the thumbnails of the files listed on stdin would be much more useful to me than a mouse-oriented file browser", and I do not have a GUI file browser anyways. I do use command-line programs for most things, even though I have X Windows to run some GUI programs and to be able to have multiple xterms at once (I often have many xterms at once). However, it could be improved as I describe above, too.
They mention the shell. I agree that it could be greatly improved, and I think that it would go with the other improvements above. My operating system design effectively requires "programs as pure functions over streams of data" (although it is functions over "capabilities", and not necessarily "streams of data") due to the way that the capability-based security is working, and the way the linking and capability passing is working also allows working like higher-order functions and transformations and all of that stuff. Even, my idea also involves message passing (all I/O is done by passing messages between capabilities), too.
I had also considered programs that require types. One of the forks (like I mentioned above) of a executable file can specify the expected type of the initial message, and the command shell can use this to effectively make them like functions that have types.
Something they don't mention is security. That can also be improved; the capability-based security that I mention above, if you have proxy capabilities too, will improve it. There is also the possibility that users can use the command shell and write other programs to make up your own proxy capabilities, and this allows programs to be used to do things that they were not necessarily designed to do, in addition to improving security. Instead of merely a user account, it might e.g. allow to write to only one file, or allow connecting to only one remote computer (without the program knowing which one it is, and perhaps even with data compression that the application program is unaware of), etc.
I still think that, even if you have powerful computers, you should still program it efficiently anyways.
The new one won't be UNIX; it will be something else.
Wild, very cool
It's an interactive shell FFS, does it get more REPL than that?!
`set -x` is what you want brother.
If "I can read my source just into the canonical datatype" was the standard for an environment to be meaningfully homoiconic, you could easily argue that bare metal was homoiconic for the same reason. And in fact I'd argue that it would be easier to hand-assemble VAX instructions to write more opcodes in memory (because the VAX-11 had such an extensive and convenient instruction set, especially all of the three-operand bit swizzling and manipulation instructions) than to do C code generation with a base Unix environment.
In the case of Unix, the question is probably "what is the canonical representation of executable code". I think the author's intent was to mostly talk about shell scripts, and not something like C code. Manipulating shell scripts via e.g. sed is, I think, pretty doable.
I'm also a bit confused why homoiconicity needs to be convenient to be real. Most people don't find shell a very convenient language in other aspects, either.
Windows does this too... it's just less touted to be such an environment as it has a lot of applications built in binary form which do a lot of work for you. But essentially, most of it's functionality is exposed via scripting interfaces, a lot of programs can also be extended with simple scripts. This even without including powershell into the mix, which allows to really go the next mile. you can even createRemoteThread (maybe a bad idea, but an example of how extensible it is! ;D)... - it's not posix etc. but definitely programmable.
don't get me wrong, i do love that people on unix aim to make things pipeable. I'd hope someday they will make their outputs easier to parse though rather than to have to have cut,awk,sed in the mix every-time to reformat stuff into a structure more easily interpreted. A common difficult task is to parse output from 'ls'. The underlying data is quite organized at every level, but the tool outputs are a big struggle to parse if you don't want to rely on strict formatting of filenames.
this last bit ofcourse can be said about many things about computers and data storage/exchane - it's kind of always a mess. there's so many standard ways to output things, and non-standard, that it's just a zoo of stuff to parse...
I'd be delighted if someday there's an OS which requires things sent into another program to adhere to an open and well defined data formatting standard, and just one at that. I guess no one wants to reinvent the wheel though and make each piped data piece be strictly json or something like that. it would make life a lot easier and can even be serialized/deserialized fairly generically to optimise transfer where needed...
It's what i want to do for my own OS, sadly no one will ever use that... :D but i am free to dream as i type a million lines of defines and bit twiddles! :D
As for piping text around, that is largely a product of a different era. an era when resources were more limited and ideas less developed. Keep in mind that Unix was developed at a time when most interactive systems used glorified typewriters. (While a terminal doesn't have to be a computer, the complexity pretty much necessitates IC's and they quickly evolved into simple computers.)
Emacs?
Jokes aside, I really do think S-exprs would be a good candidate for what you’re talking about as they can represent the same structures as JSON et al with less ceremony. Since S-exprs separate atoms with whitespace, and most UNIXy programs parse structured text using whitespace, you could implicitly wrap those programs’ input/output with parens to make them work on S-exprs.
And remember being able to embed an arbitrary application into a rectangle in your Word document or PowerPoint presentation, with OLE? That was related.
With entr you can watch a directory of souces and run make upon writing a file.
That's superior to the pure Unix <<batch jobs'>> philosophy over plain pipes.