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Sorry, but this is wrong. Dead wrong.Sorry, but this is wrong. Dead wrong.Posted Dec 11, 2011 16:21 UTC (Sun) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)In reply to: Sorry, but this is wrong. Dead wrong. by nix Parent article: Evolution of shells in Linux (developerWorks)
Which would be why POSIX, uh, standardized them more than ten years ago, and imposed rules which virtually all standard tools follow. Some of the most basic aspects were indeed standardised by POSIX, but that doesn't detract from the fact that, say, the option to specify a field delimiter is »-d« for cut(1), »-t« for sort(1), »-F« for awk(1), and so on. POSIX basically codified the wild hodgepodge that existed at the time. Now the meaning of common options (as opposed to basic option syntax) would have been something actually worth standardising, but of course it would have rendered 20 years' worth of shell scripts virtually useless, so it didn't happen.
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Sorry, but this is wrong. Dead wrong. Posted Dec 11, 2011 17:03 UTC (Sun) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
I also think that standardization wasn't an unmitigated positive because it solidified and made rigid 20 years worth of crufty, work-in-progress system software and didn't allow for any forward progress for cleaning up the mess. GNU helped a lot but only now are we going back and re-thinking the system from the beginning and making it super awesome. Plan9 did much of the same work but failed because it wasn't a gradual, in-place migration path.
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