Jonathan Blow

It may be old, but wouldn't it be neat if people were… learning and using it? Instead of reimplementing all the things they don't know it already provides? I've seen so much software that would be little more than a slim slice of bash and make… if only people knew their unix…

Except, people hate using things made from bash and make, because they are buggy and clumsy and have weird failure states. That's at least part of the reason. The other part is there are 30 trillion programs installed, how is anyone supposed to know what is even there?

My experience is that people hate base level unix tools (and come on, there are like three dozen that count) because they vastly overestimate their ability to improve upon them, regardless of how buggy and clumsy they are. And I'm not even sure that they are.

It shouldn't be hard to improve on them. They are from the 1970s. If we don't have better ideas 50 years later, we suck real bad. I agree that many people *don't* improve on them, but that is a different story.

Well... Rust community is currently making a credible effort of doing that properly. Following them with great interest. I'd use make reimplemented in Rust in a heartbeat (if well done etc.)

Check out stuff like ripgrep and follow the trail if this is news to you.

I think it's a good idea to rewrite things so that they are known to be more-correct, but the RIIR movement is not going to make things that much simpler, because the core problem is not the actual source code.

Hmm, I thought your main objection was the stuff about "they are buggy and clumsy and have weird failure states". For me as a spectator, it seems like they're at least following the right trail in that regard...