He said similar negative things about Unix in a 2004 interview with Slashdot.
"I didn't use Unix at all, really, from about 1990 until 2002, when I joined Google. (I worked entirely on Plan 9, which I still believe does a pretty good job of solving those fundamental problems.) I was surprised when I came back to Unix how many of even the little things that were annoying in 1990 continue to annoy today. In 1975, when the argument vector had to live in a 512-byte-block, the 6th Edition system would often complain, 'arg list too long'. But today, when machines have gigabytes of memory, I still see that silly message far too often. The argument list is now limited somewhere north of 100K on the Linux machines I use at work, but come on people, dynamic memory allocation is a done deal!
"I started keeping a list of these annoyances but it got too long and depressing so I just learned to live with them again. 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."
> The argument list is now limited somewhere north of 100K on the Linux machines I use at work, but come on people, dynamic memory allocation is a done deal!
This is a shitty argument. Dynamic memory allocation is a done deal, but it's trivial to bring down a system that doesn't limit it, and so you still need a limit beyond which users will still get errors.
And usually, if you keep getting it, it's down to bad habits (globbing instead of find + xarg, the latter which lets you take full advantage of multiple processors)
"I didn't use Unix at all, really, from about 1990 until 2002, when I joined Google. (I worked entirely on Plan 9, which I still believe does a pretty good job of solving those fundamental problems.) I was surprised when I came back to Unix how many of even the little things that were annoying in 1990 continue to annoy today. In 1975, when the argument vector had to live in a 512-byte-block, the 6th Edition system would often complain, 'arg list too long'. But today, when machines have gigabytes of memory, I still see that silly message far too often. The argument list is now limited somewhere north of 100K on the Linux machines I use at work, but come on people, dynamic memory allocation is a done deal!
"I started keeping a list of these annoyances but it got too long and depressing so I just learned to live with them again. 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."
http://slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob-pike-responds...