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Aucbvax.5848 fa.info-vax utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!info-vax Tue Jan 19 22:49:08 1982 Shrager on Pandora's Box >From Lars.Ericson@CMU-10A Tue Jan 19 10:41:51 1982

- - - - Begin forwarded message - - - - Date: 19 January 1982 0725-EST (Tuesday) From: Jeff.Shrager at CMU-10A To: Lars.Ericson at CMU-10A Subject: Re: CL is important CC: duane.williams at CMU-10A, Peter Lucas at CMU-10A, winsti at Wharton-10, bagley at MIT-MC In-Reply-To: <19JAN82 022347 LE60@CMU-10A> Origin: A310JS1E at CMU-10A; 19 Jan 1982 0725-EST

Yes, Unix happens to provide the features that you mention but they are, at some level of use, incorrectly implemented and thus cause problems merely because of their existance:

[1] Pipes

The Unix piping system does not really provide what a real expert who has come from a functional programming language wants. You can't fit things together in the general way that makes Lisp so powerful. More to the point, the availability of pipes leads programmers into the pandora's box of serious inefficientcy. Instead of writing code which may be thousands of times more efficient than piping your data through the sorter, one does the latter. Consider the time that is wasted sorting a list of flonums via the pipes -- a seriously attractive tendency on Unix. This is NOT the way to write programs but Unix makes inefficiency easy for exactly the reason that gives it the most flexibility.

[2] Streams

Unix has the right idea but the worst concievable implementation. Streams of characters are the least useful sort of consistent data type. It is orders of magnitude more efficient and useful to keep records and turn them into streams when you have to rather than the other way around. This should even make sense to the lowly C programmer who gets LINE NUMBERS back in his (or her) C error messages. Consider having to use a database which sorted its records by turning them (from the nice ISAM internal format) into streams of characters, piping them through the sorter, and then turing them back into ISAM - to use your term: "BOGUS!" This seems so crystal clear to me that I can't imagine anyone arguing it (but I'm sure you will because you, like all other Unix religious fanatics, have been brought up in a corrupted environment (CMU) where all you've ever seen are Unix and VMS).

[3] VMS

Also rots for a lot of other worse reasons. I wouldn't touch either of them with a pole except that I am forced to around here. It is beyond me that people buy Vaxen. They're not that fast and they're not all that cheap and they run the two loser systems (except maybe against OS1100 or OS/360) of the decade.

[4] On Dogmatism

The very worst problem with Unix has nothing to do with Unix per se. It is that people are brought up thinking that Unix is the god of OS design (take, A.R. for instance) and thus, when they get to a Unix system they turn their brains off and stop thinking that there can be anything wrong with it. Unix has set operating system development back 10 years by its very existence! Use Lisp or APL or Mesa or Salltalk -- not Unix or VMS.

[Feel free to forward this wherever you like. -- Jeff] - - - - End forwarded message - - - -

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