Perl 4 was great. Instead of all different versions of awk (awk, nawk, gawk), shell (some had functions, some didn't, bash wasn't everywhere nor was ksh. csh varied too!) on the different Unices, you had a tool that could work the same on all of them. Plus lots of modules. Perl 5 continued this

Eventually the Unices converged to Linux and the GNU versions of awk, shell, etc. And python came & caught up to Perl's modules. Perl got mired in Perl 6.

With python, there is an enforced style so everyone reads the same way. There is usually an obvious way to do things.

Perl's motto is "There's more than 1 way to do it" and I think many of the books/perl programmers go out of the way to prove it.

I do enough puzzle solving in my job. I want my programs to be obvious and easy to understand 6 months later.

I'm sure that was a milder choice of words than is usually spoken at that company

I had a UK manager explain that when he had bad news for his boss, he had to carry a plastic model of the poo emojii when he delivered it. Childish and boorish. Him for talking about it, worse for his boss(s).

We are led by donkeys.

In the Northeastern US, we get snow storms. Snow can build up on trees, etc and take them down. Some trees are near powerlines too.

In 20 years, I've lost count of the number of times power was out more than 2 days. There is usually a power outage once a year. I remember one that lasted a week and a coworker with an hour commute had no power for 3 weeks. One time, the neighbor's tree across the street fell on the power line. The power company had things back in 24hrs, but it may have been 36hrs.

However, yes, we don't worry about powering up computers. They're on a UPS that shuts everything down after 5 minutes and I don't have to worry about a crash. I also have a generator to power heating, the fridge and a few appliances. Before I had the generator, I would worry about if there's enough heat or do I need to go to family in another area that has power.

I had a 2015 Subaru and was going to buy a replacement, but hit the same thing. I bought a Honda instead.

At least phones have a consistent UI.

Cars used to be fairly similar. High/low beam on the floor, emergency brake on the floor (some had a center lever)
Blinker on the left. Wipers... on the dash or on the right like the blinker
Radio in the center w/ volume on left, tuning on right w/ 5 buttons for favorites
Heating, fan, defrost varied a bit more, but it was usually in the center.

Part of it. It was a stumbling block out of the gate. I tried the Jolix BSD (before all the others) and it didn't work on my 486. Linux did. FreeBSD and BSDi didn't exist quite yet. I didn't look at the BSDs again for 10 years. By that time I had introduced Linux into my work (I was a sysadmin). I was lucky to work at a place that used OpenBSD for firewalls and FreeBSD for web servers. Linux was everywhere else.

Sure. Some wouldn't touch FreeBSD because of the Daemon mascot

Linux was easier to contribute to. It seems like you have to be part of the "inner circle" to add to BSD. Plus there are 3 of them. When you contribute to the Linux kernel, it goes to all Linux distributions.

I remember an Oracle developer at a Linux user group saying he compiled Oracle on Linux & it didn't need any changes. This was before it was offered for sale. When Oracle started selling for Linux, it drove sales.

The dotcom collapse also meant there was no VC capital to buy "proper" Unix systems. They had to max out their credit cards so they bought x86 and put Linux on them. In most cases they found the AMP stack was faster on Linux than on Solaris that they were paying $$$ for during the dotcom.

Having multiple systems can help w/ security. But having 1 OS means you need one set of skills. I don't want to go back to the admin differences between Solaris, SunOS, OSF/Digital Unix/Tru64, HP-UX, Irix, Xenix, Ultrix. Linux is basically rpm/yum and deb/apt flavors.

The BSDs might be better for some things but you always adapt Linux. OpenZFS is a good example. It's often a source code download that gets built locally and installed because of the CDDL license where in BSD, it's in the kernel and distributed as a binary.

Maybe containers can be added to BSD, I think they're on MacOSX. They're on Windows (they have a Linux layer to do it!).

Look at what Apple did with Arm. They moved so much stuff on the chip, eliminating bottlenecks. From a high level, they changed the architecture of the motherboard.

Could anyone but Intel or AMD do such a reimagining?
Does the ARM licensing put a limit on what you can do?

RISC-V means you can do even more customization than ARM. You don't need have licensing to pay.

These CPU designs always trickle up from the bottom. The ones at the top performance (Ahmdahl, Cray, other mainframes, VAX) eventually got caught by something that started cheap and grew up. 6502, 8080/Z80, 68000, 8088 got put into embedded systems and home computers.

Eventually with workstations they trying to build the next platform at the top. Sparc, MIPS, PA-RISC, PowerPC, Alpha. x86 had the volume & could invest in speeding up other pieces of the motherboard, like memory managment. Intel got the fever to redo x86 with Itanium but AMD was able to modify x86 to do more.

Then you had ARM in embedded systems/phones after the PC market followed the x86 volume/performance. Licensees could customize ARM like some of the other RISC, but there was volume to make it cheaper.

If RISC-V can get used at volume, it could become cheaper than ARM and surpass it. With custom CPUs heating up (nvidia GPUs for AI) for AI and other custom workloads, maybe ARM/x86 could be displaced?

I was at a place trying to hire a maintenance guy. There was a drug test that used a piece lock of hair & it would detect a month back. He failed the 1st one, so they gave him another test after 2 weeks. He failed that, so another 2 weeks. He passed the 3rd test. Then they found out he couldn't drive the maintenance truck because he didn't have a driver's licence.

I had an '85 Nissan Pickup. I would love one today. It was 15 feet by 5.5ft wide by 5ft tall and under 2500 libs. A Ford Ranger is 17.5x6x6 ft and over 4000 lbs.

I don't need power windows, locks. I'd like to be able to hose out the floor too.

Or the low bidder won because they forgot something.
In the construction business, they will go out of business if they repeat. Contracts are mostly fixed costs and the bidder will have to eat the overage if they make a mistake.
If you get a cost-plus contract, it's because you have proven yourself to the bid owner. If you've really proven yourself, there won't be a bid and you can do time & materials job contract.

FreeBSD wasn't around when Linux came out. Dr, Dobb's had a series on 386BSD around that time which IIRC led to FreeBSD.

Unix on PCs was $$$, often as much as the PC. The compiler was often another chunk of $. They also required a 386, Minix and later, Coherent, ran on the '86 and '286 systems we had and were under $200. We all wanted the Unix environment, so we tried to get as close as we could.

Absolutely. Many of us were using Minix. It had limitations that prevented it from being real Unix.

1st, the memory model is 64k I&D. Many Unix tools did not fit. Especially the GNU tools everyone wanted. There were patches for 386s that did allow different memory models, but most of us didn't have them.

2nd, You could not distribute the code. Instead, cdiffs were distributed and you had to patch the code which was messy. There was no packaging beyond tar and compress.

3rd Patches were not really accepted into Minix & those 386 patches never went in back then. Minix was created to teach students who didn't have 386s, not hobbyists trying to have Unix.

I don't remember if DJGPP was there at the start of Linux. Most of us running Dos didn't have 386s and most of the GNU tools were not there. There were the GNUish utils that ported some tools (not emacs!). I can't remember if they needed a 286.

I found Dos and all the public domain ports of Unix tools to be as good as Minix mostly. In the end, both were toy Unixen, not the real thing.

Definitely. 386s came out and started to get affordable too. When I got my 486 in '91 ($5k!), I downloaded 386BSD and it didn't boot. Linux (0.95) did and I never looked back. I suspect most were like me.

My system didn't have a soundcard or CD-ROM. Those would have added > $300. Dial up internet was also not available. I was able to go to a local college computer lab and later worked for a company that was on the internet before everyone was able to get internet.

Linux also allowed others to contribute. Minix didn't back then and neither did 386BSD.

BSD had the AT&T lawsuit over it so there was reluctance to distribute. Some of the core developers formed a commercial product, BSD386 and I think they were sued as well.

They didn't care to learn about the US employment system.

When I worked for a UK based company they took too long to let people go.

It took a year to see "the guy who goes out for a walk" get fired. When 4 of the 7 main developers gave notice, on the same day, they should have shut down the US office for the project. Within 2 months another lead dev and the lead devops left.

The devops left because he was supposed to be able to hire 1-2 more devops. When he asked for budget to set up CI in the cloud, he was denied and spent the next few months figuring out how to use AWS for the runners on the free tier and looking for another job. When he left, no one could fix it, they gave us the budget right away for the runners in the CI system

It took over 6 months to start closing things. Management was too busy doing boarding school pranks like carrying a real life poo emoji to upper management when there was bad news. Wankers.

It was easily the worst place for management I ever worked.

The US coworkers were good. They fired one guy when he had cancer probably because they didn't understand the US Heath system (which is fair, but they should figure it out. I brought him in to my current company within a year when he was able to work again and he's still here 5 years later

As a coder, I hated having management that was fulls of salesman types. Instead of a group email (or chat) to everyone possibly involved in the issue, they would phone one person. This triggered a chain of 1-1 conversations to find the ones with the knowledge needed and with less & less detail of what happened. Usually someone in the middle came up with the answer, but not the one needed. If there was a message to a group, the needed people would take part in a subsequent thread, leaving out all that search.

Or worse, I'd ask a question in email and they'd set up a meeting instead of just replying. A few times, I was able to avoid the meeting with 10 minutes of back & forth email. We also had a 5 hour time zone gap which made interactive collaboration harder.

The other thing is that the chat, email and calls need to not just be about work. That can make them work like the water cooler meetup. If you don't have the non-work, you will miss work related things that come up at lunch, coffee, etc. I've seen that happen. I've also seen a group that was across timezones stop collaborating when people didn't have the annecdotes in the electronic connections.

If I go to the office, I'll have to drive in traffic ~ 60 minutes total. The drive home will be slow, bumper to bumper w/ risks of hitting people. More when its snowing.

Now, I might not drive for a week or more. My depression has improved. I'm less angry at things. I am not getting burned out as I was before.

But I have a WFH job. I could leave & get more for something in an office, but it just isn't worth 30-40% more pay and 10% less time for myself because of the commute.