>use them as twm was the latest revolution in window managers and work as if one just had multiple PDP-11 instances running simultaneously.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean: please work on your grammar.
You seem to be saying that we buy hefty workstations, and then run TWM on unix, and use them as a bunch of PDP-11s, and that this is bad. I'm not sure I agree on any of those points.
First off, a lot of us like lightweight WMs: You don't need the glitz, so why spend the cycles and processing power on it, when you could spend it on, say, your actual 3d graphics applications? And for many of us, they're just pleasant to work on.
Secondly, the terminal is an acceptable, and even good, UI for many purposes.
Finally, most unixes support OpenGL, so when you want to do that heavy graphics work, you can.
It is bad because the UNIX culture just froze in time.
Computers with the hardware computing power capable of making Xerox PARC researchers dream of new worlds, are bought and used exactly the same way as if they were a Sun-3 workstation.
Then Bret Victor does a presentation and everyone is amazed what proper desktop programming environment should be capable of.
No wonder, that the majority of the developers, which actually cares about the overall desktop experience has moved into macOS or back to Windows. Which are also the biggest communities producing applications for mobile devices.
As Rob Pike, a person that might know one or two things about UNIX, puts it
"We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy."
In some ways. I'm willing to accept that there may be better paradigms out there. However...
>Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy.
Unix can be used as a base for many things. I've written code in a Smalltalk environment written by Alan Kay, Hacked on Scheme and Lisp code inside of Emacs (not ideal, but lightyears ahead of the standard write-compile-test cycle that plagues the industry), written code in an entirely visual programming language, and many other things, all inside of Unix. It may not be the best system for supporting such things, but it works, and that counts for a lot.
I may listen to David Cassidy, but that doesn't mean I can't put on some Daft Punk every once in a while.
The other matter is, of course, that you and Rob Pike wouldn't agree on what is a better OS: Pike's vision likely hews closer to Plan 9, a system that you would likely find too close to Unix.
At the end of the day, Unix can kind of suck. I mean, I like it, I'm by no means a Unix Hater, but it has issues, it's not perfect, and we should look at alternative systems in the future. But it works, and it makes most of the people happy most of the time. That's something its competitors still can't really say. And while Unix has (to some degree) learned from what those competitors do well, something that many of its competitors didn't really do (save Windows (Mac is actually part of the Unix family): While I don't really like PowerShell, I can't deny it's an interesting idea, and potentially a good one).
At the end of the day, all systems suck. Unix sucks more than many, but perhaps less than most.
If that was contradictory and incoherent, well than so are my opinions on Unix, and OSes in general. Also, most of what I write is pretty nonsensical anyways, so I'm not sure how different this is anyways.
> The other matter is, of course, that you and Rob Pike wouldn't agree on what is a better OS: Pike's vision likely hews closer to Plan 9, a system that you would likely find too close to Unix.
Actually we are quite in sync there, as the latest version of Plan 9 was actually Inferno with Limbo as the main programming language for the user space layer.
And Plan 9, specially ACME, has quite a few Oberon influences as well.
Right now, the only thing I mostly disagree with him are some of the design decisions regarding Go.
Really? I'm quite shocked... Oh. Wait, it's because I keep confusing you with lispm. He would find plan9 lacking, you wouldn't. This makes sense.
bangs head on wall
ACME was cool. It's not quite enough to make me switch from emacs, especially stripped from the plan 9 environment, but it's enough to make me drool with envy, especially over the structured regexes and powerful piping tools.
Well, I know what my summer Elisp project is.
>only thing I mostly disagree with him are some of the design decisions regarding Go.
Frankly, I'm not shocked. Nobody I know that has similar opinions to you likes Go, and I can understand why.
As a Schemer, I can respect minimalism in design: The question is whether Go chose the right ideas to implement/not implement. The jury is still out, but it seems to be leaning toward no.
>use them as twm was the latest revolution in window managers and work as if one just had multiple PDP-11 instances running simultaneously.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean: please work on your grammar.
You seem to be saying that we buy hefty workstations, and then run TWM on unix, and use them as a bunch of PDP-11s, and that this is bad. I'm not sure I agree on any of those points.
First off, a lot of us like lightweight WMs: You don't need the glitz, so why spend the cycles and processing power on it, when you could spend it on, say, your actual 3d graphics applications? And for many of us, they're just pleasant to work on.
Secondly, the terminal is an acceptable, and even good, UI for many purposes.
Finally, most unixes support OpenGL, so when you want to do that heavy graphics work, you can.