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In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

(web.stanford.edu)
412 points conanxin | 1 comments | 27 Jul 24 06:25 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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pavlov ◴[27 Jul 24 09:56 UTC] No.41085505[source]▶
The CLI has a massive blind spot in today’s operating systems: it knows nothing useful about events.

Yet events are the primary way anything happens on a computer, whether it’s a user system or a server.

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skydhash ◴[27 Jul 24 12:16 UTC] No.41086080[source]▶
In unix world, everything is a file, so you can poll the file waiting for something to happen. And there’s the whole signal thing and dbus exists.
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pavlov ◴[27 Jul 24 12:43 UTC] No.41086216[source]▶
Yeah, these are the event paradigms that I meant by “nothing useful.”

Files are not a good abstraction for events. Signals are broken in many ways. And DBus is both extremely clunky to use and non-portable.

There isn’t a built-in event paradigm similar to how streams and pipes are an integral part of the Unix-style CLI.

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1. dandanua ◴[27 Jul 24 13:28 UTC] No.41086460[source]▶
> Files are not a good abstraction for events

Why is that? On the low level everything is a state of electronic cells. Files address those cells in a suitable fashion. Modern programming abstractions such as async/await are very simple, but fail miserably if you need something really complex and efficient.