{"id":821,"date":"2014-03-23T15:46:27","date_gmt":"2014-03-23T15:46:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sdi.thoughtstorms.info\/?p=821"},"modified":"2014-03-23T15:46:27","modified_gmt":"2014-03-23T15:46:27","slug":"why-is-unix-better-for-programming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.thoughtstorms.info\/?p=821","title":{"rendered":"Why is UNIX better for programming?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href='http:\/\/www.quora.com\/Why-is-UNIX-better-for-programming\/answer\/Phil-Jones'>My Quora Answer<\/a> : <\/p>\n<p>\n In practice, there are only two operating systems today with any real traction : Unix (including Linux, BSD, Android, MacOS etc.) and Windows.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nAnd from my point of view, Windows has two fundamental problems :<\/p>\n<p>1) A lousy command-line terminal environment that<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>a) doesn&#8217;t work in the &#8220;conventional&#8221; way that Unix terminals do;<\/li>\n<li>b) doesn&#8217;t have the comprehensive set of standard tools we&#8217;re used to;<\/li>\n<li>c) doesn&#8217;t have the piping model to plug together multiple small \/ independent tools to get work done. <br \/>\n(I know there&#8217;s &#8220;PowerShell&#8221; but this seems to an optional extra rather than part of the OS out of the box, so you might as well say Windows is Unix because of cygwin. )<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>\n2) Lousy multi-tasking. I&#8217;ve had Windows 7 freeze-up on me over a dozen times in the last week. I don&#8217;t even understand that. How can an operating system that&#8217;s been in development for over 30 years, by one the richest and most significant operating system companies on the planet, still have multi-tasking that&#8217;s so bad that errors in applications or drivers can bring down the entire machine and force a restart? Unix solved that problem in the 1970s, and Microsoft still can&#8217;t figure it out?\n<\/p>\n<p>Being able to multi-task and not let rogue programs hurt everyone else is a <strong>basic<\/strong> requirement for an operating system.\n<\/p>\n<p>Bonus : today as a Ubuntu (ie. Debian-family) user I find the Debian package manger model brilliant. Why would I want to waste my precious time figuring out how to install software except using apt-get. It&#8217;s fast, consistent, reliable and easily reversable. Plus pretty much every tool I could possibly want is already free-software, so I&#8217;m not hitting pay-walls, mazes of twisty advertising or other annoyances in order to get it. I just type one line in my terminal and I have what I need to keep working.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My Quora Answer : In practice, there are only two operating systems today with any real traction : Unix (including Linux, BSD, Android, MacOS etc.) and Windows. And from my point of view, Windows has two fundamental problems : 1) A lousy command-line terminal environment that a) doesn&#8217;t work in the &#8220;conventional&#8221; way that Unix [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[181,478,479],"class_list":["post-821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-gnulinux","tag-unix","tag-unix-pipe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.thoughtstorms.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.thoughtstorms.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.thoughtstorms.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.thoughtstorms.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.thoughtstorms.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=821"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.thoughtstorms.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/821\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.thoughtstorms.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.thoughtstorms.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.thoughtstorms.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}