Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!genrad!decvax!decwrl!sun!guy From: guy@sun.UUCP Newsgroups: net.unix Subject: Re: Favorite operating systems query Message-ID: <4280@sun.uucp> Date: Thu, 19-Jun-86 15:40:00 EDT Article-I.D.: sun.4280 Posted: Thu Jun 19 15:40:00 1986 Date-Received: Sat, 21-Jun-86 10:46:24 EDT References: <339@valid.UUCP> <452@geowhiz.UUCP> Distribution: net Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc. Lines: 55 A lot of the other complaints have already been shown not to be grounded in reality, so I won't bother adding more logs to the first.... > 7) IPC. Shared memory, sockets, pty's, pipes, ioctls all over the place. > And the only one that's not been hacked in as an after thought is pipes. Well, "hacked in as an afterthought" is a low-content (if not no-content) phrase; it could be interpreted as "anything not in First Edition UNIX was 'hacked in as an afterthought'", or "anything not put in at Research was 'hacked in as an afterthought'". Yes, there are problems with the various flavors of UNIX IPC, but they do get the job done; saying > IPC in Unix bytes the giant weenie. is somewhat extreme. > 9) Related to (7), networking support. Sockets are gross. This isn't just > my opinion, ask the DoD what they think of sockets. OK, how are sockets gross? How does the DOD think sockets are gross? Is it "sockets" they don't like, or perhaps the 4.2BSD TCP/IP implementation? Blaming sockets for the latter is like blaming C for the inadequacies of UNIX. > OK, now that I've got all the fanatics foaming at the mouth, let me throw > in my disclaimer. I've been a Unix fanatic myself for the past 4 years. It's interesting to note that another poster gave a long list of what they didn't like about VMS and liked about UNIX, and then said that VMS was their favorite system. > Read net.mail - every time the postmaster at some large site leaves his job > the mail gets all fouled up. What happened to programs that run themselves, > without being nursed? It's not clear this is UNIX's fault. There are programs which run under UNIX which "run themselves". There are programs (including, I suspect, some mail systems) running under other operating systems which don't. > Unix has too much folklore & guru-ness about it to be accepted into the > mainstream. I don't think this is intrinsic to UNIX. I suspect (especially given that a UNIX hacker gave a long list of what they saw as problems with UNIX, and that at least one VMS hacker gave a long list of what they saw as problems with VMS) that in many cases "favorite operating system" is equivalent to "first operating system that a person learned in depth", and that the question of which OSes are good and which are bad isn't very black-and-white. Much the same is true of editors, programming languages, etc.. -- Guy Harris {ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy guy@sun.com (or guy@sun.arpa)