The single most disastrous failing of UNIX is the assumption that everyone wants to be a programmer - or if they don't want to be a programmer, they damn well should become a programmer anyway.

It's nonsense. Programming as it's done today - which is strongly influenced by UNIX ideas - is the last thing most users want to do. They have absolutely no interest in the concepts, the ideas, the assumptions, the mindset, the technology, or the practical difficulties of writing software.

UNIX set human-accessible computing back by decades. It eventually settled into a kind of compromise at Apple, where BSD supplied the plumbing and infrastructure and NeXT/Apple's built a simplified app creation system on top of it, which could then be used to build relatively friendly applications.

But it's still not right, because the two things that make UNIX powerful - interoperability and composability - didn't survive.

They were implemented in a way that's absolutely incomprehensible to non-programmers. Opaque documentation, zero standardisation for command options, and ridiculous command name choices all make UNIX incredibly user hostile. Meanwhile the underlying OS details, including the file systems and process model - never mind security - fall somewhat short of OS perfection.

The real effect of UNIX has been to keep programming professional and to keep user-friendly concepts well away from commercial and academic development.

Programming could have been made much more accessible, and there's consistent evidence from BASIC, Hypercard, VBA, the HTML web, and even Delphi (at a push) that the more accessible a development environment is made, the more non-developers will use it to get fun and/or useful things done.

UNIX has always worked hard to be the opposite - an impenetrably hostile wall of developer exceptionalism that makes the learning curve for development so brutally steep it might as well be vertical.

UNIX people like to talk about commercial walled gardens as if they're the worst possible thing. But UNIX is a walled garden itself, designed - whether consciously or not - to lock out non-professional non-developer users and make sure they don't go poking at things they shouldn't try to understand.

But it has to be. Linux can be super powerful. You can get very close to the metal. While a lot of people want to use it as an appliance, it really isn't. Just like all the other trades there is history which begets convention which begets culture. And like any good power tool you've got to know what you're doing, or you could get yourself into trouble.

The problem, I think, is that we seem to have trouble conceptualizing the schism that exists between the computing-as-a-tool users (aka the elites, power users, and programmers) and computing-as-an-appliance users (aka the computing mainstream). Both camps have wildly different wants, needs, and expectations.

Why can't both continue to exist separately? The elites don't want their tools weakened, and the mainstream just wants stuff to work. Split computing down the middle at desktops+laptops vs tablets+mobile+consoles and keep the separation clean. Now that we have iPads and whatnot there's no reason to keep nontechnicals on a PC if they don't want to be there... so why not let PCs return to the nerds?

> UNIX set human-accessible computing back by decades. [...]

I do not agree at all. Closed-garden non-free eco systems like Windows set back computing.

> Programming could have been made much more accessible, and there's consistent evidence from BASIC, Hypercard, VBA, the HTML web, and even Delphi (at a push) that the more accessible a development environment is made, the more non-developers will use it to get fun and/or useful things done.

So why are they not going strong? There are implementations for BASIC for most systems and even Delphi is still available.

> [...] But UNIX is a walled garden itself, designed - whether consciously or not - to lock out non-professional non-developer users [...]

Assuming with UNIX you mean implementations today (like Linux) this is not true at all.

I do not want to say Unix (with BSDs and Linux today) is the absolute best we can do, but I am pretty sure that it is on a local optimum in the operating systems space.

I agree with a lot of what you wrote. It's true that there is a "keep it for the elite" mindset in the back of many programmers' mind. For years at forums I've seen that while I tried hard to explain basic concepts to newbies, others were happier with the RTFM answer.

Still I'm not so sure that UNIX (or programmers) is the source of it. I started with DOS (later Windows) and TP (later Delphi) so please don't think I'm biased here.

I have recently bought an Acer convertible for my mother with Windows 10 and so I'm getting a reality check on the sad state of computer usability in 2017. Teaching her to use an Android phone was difficult, but this is not better.

IMHO the reason of user-hostility is not some guild mindset, it's just that computer adoption is needed much faster than the time it would take to develop decent GUIs. The RTFM knee-jerk reaction comes later from people with some deep insecurities and not much imagination.

Totally agree on that UNIX is also a sort of walled garden. I'd say the same thing about GPL'd ecosystem, in this case for license issues.

I'd guess that much of this depends on who's writing the software. FOSS was (and still is to a great degree) driven by "nerds" in their spare time. If there's no Steve Jobs that smacks programmers about for neglecting the user experience for non-technical users, it won't make much progress. At other places (say Redhat) there's no big need to focus on non-technical users for business reasons when it comes to much of development. And so on and so forth.

If you can accredit Apple with one thing, it would be that they got this mainly right.

When it comes to Windows... I guess that's the result if one main player has a de facto monopoly over a certain software space. That, and "legacy reasons". It's like Adobe who couldn't even get their hotkeys merged between various of their big applications.

I've only owned a Mac and honestly I hasn't found it really better. Actually I was surprised to find there are unsolvable user hostility problems like font size. For most Windows annoyances there were usually some registry key that you can touch.

Yeah... I've found Mac/iOS to be quite frustrating actually. Especially nowadays that their UI's a designed by designers who like things to be pretty — and you just can't change something no matter how bad it is (unless you want the touchpad to move the scrollbar instead of the page. they'll let you do that, even tho it's completely useless. they're not opposed to choice or flexibility, just opposed to ones that make things understandable or powerful at the expense of pretty).

all of your arguments here - pro or con - are reflections of philosophy and have nothing to do with computers

> The single most disastrous failing of UNIX is the assumption that everyone wants to be a programmer - or if they don't want to be a programmer, they damn well should become a programmer anyway.

this presumes programming (which itself is simply logical thinking) is something obscure and 'scary'. Elementary school computer literacy courses in the mid-late 80s/ early 90s routinely taught more programming know-how to adolescents than college graduates have today. Is this because kids are stupid? or has the goal of curricula been relegated from 'high level understdanding and knowledge' to 'economic productivity within the present system'?

> The real effect of UNIX has been to keep programming professional and to keep user-friendly concepts well away from commercial and academic development.

really? is that why UNIX minis rapidly displaced mainframes in the late 70s/early 80s, with major advances primarily being derived from the cross-compatibility of most unix flavors being shared within industry and academia? Or is this another argument towards 'economic productivity within the current sytem' ?

> Programming could have been made much more accessible, and there's consistent evidence from BASIC, Hypercard, VBA, the HTML web, and even Delphi (at a push) that the more accessible a development environment is made, the more non-developers will use it to get fun and/or useful things done.

a) by evidence, you're referring to cross-linked excel spreadsheet nightmares? b) by evidence, why does this not include all of the literally millions of interpreted programs in say shell, awk, TCL, and so on written by unix users in professional settings across time? c) compare shell scripting to batch scripting. seriously. Also, the web was invented on Unix. d) See also use of lisp, etc. in the 80s for pretty much the same things

I argue that the issues you are speaking about here primarily derive as a result of the workstation Unix market focusing on the higher end, while the low end grew on the PC side - which has nothing to due with the Unix tradition itself, which due to licensing issues with AT&T, etc. was relegated to somewhat obscurity during the heavy capitialization of the PC market of the 80s.

> UNIX has always worked hard to be the opposite - an impenetrably hostile wall of developer exceptionalism that makes the learning curve for development so brutally steep it might as well be vertical.

Really? Is that why, from nearly day 1, the entire system was distributed on a single tape with complete binaries, sources, and manual pages contained on the same, self-hosting installation?

Again - while lesser users will use their knowledge of the system as some narcissistic playing card, this is their own personality flaws being interjected into the philosophical difference I mentioned previously (achieving knowledge vs brutish ad-hoc productivity)

> UNIX people like to talk about commercial walled gardens as if they're the worst possible thing. But UNIX is a walled garden itself, designed - whether consciously or not - to lock out non-professional non-developer users and make sure they don't go poking at things they shouldn't try to understand.

Again, I think this supposition is derived from the growth of the commercial Unix market, which deliberately split source code and documentation into tiny little fragments, only some of which could be even attained in the first place, and could only be run on proprietary hardware. Unix itself (the portable software system) grew in a mostly obscure, tangential lineage that was then 'walled off' from naive end users through marketing efforts of proprietary vendors. See also BSD UNIX.

> Opaque documentation, zero standardisation for command options, and ridiculous command name choices all make UNIX incredibly user hostile.

yes, things are inconsistent. but that is because the system grew organically. I give much kudos to VMS for being very solid and coherent in this regard - but that was just as much a walled garden as anything else, and still is (though interesting things could still come from the OpenVMS company)

nothing precluded anyone from bolting on a coherent addon to the unix base, and indeed many did. However they failed because unix is not a product, but a product of organic human culture -

and so ones qualms with unix are really ones unresolved qualms with human endeavor itself.