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by zorked·6y ago·view on hn ↗
> robust, clear, well-tested, and easy to maintain systems

I wonder if that's how the implementors of software that actually lasted for decades would describe their work or motivation.

Does this describe Unix, for example? In particular the old AT&T version, not GNU (or even modern BSD) code.

3 comments
Research from 1995 [1] indicates that robustness was not a strength of AT&T UNIX.

"The reliability of the basic utilities from GNU and Linux were noticeably better than those of the commercial systems."

[0] ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/paradyn/technical_papers/fuzz.pdf

[1] ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/paradyn/technical_papers/fuzz-revisited.pdf

May of the design philosophies laid by smart people like Eric Raymond are very well documented:

https://medium.com/programming-philosophy/eric-raymond-s-17-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Unix_Programming

> Does this describe Unix, for example? In particular the old AT&T version, not GNU

At least to me. Having all these composable commands, unimaginable through how many iterations all that stuff went. I also think that Go was created in that spirit, with robustness/conciseness being more important than anything. Although it seems the language and its philosophy is adapting to more common ways of doing things.