Unix cultures

Unix is a great many things. Unix is not one culture,
but many different cultures. The original ideas behind the
original implementation of unix were pretty reasonable. I
have the sense that the original implementors were pretty
reasonable too. They had a particular culture, but I don't
know exactly what it is. Then there's the old university
unix culture, and within that, the Berkeley-unix culture.

All the unix cultures I have encountered have involved
fixing things. That's probably its biggest problem. The
[smart] unix people I have talked to talk very much like the
[smart] ITS people I've talked to. I think the difference
lies in the fact that Unix has historically been centered
around cheap minicomputers which were owned by small
fiefdoms each with a very small number of users.

The result was that each person effectively had their
own personal copy of unix, and made their own personal bug
fixes. They did indeed spend an inordinate amount of time
doing that. The problem with this is that it leads to a
hacking mentality.

I use "hacking" in the sense of "hacking something
together", of jury-rigging. The unix culture never
developed the notion of production software: software which
has been thoroughly tested and which was expressly
bomb-proofed during its development.

As I've said before, it's research software with
research quality. Every program is like a bachelor's thesis
which the author didn't really expect to maintain, except
possibly for herself. Never mind that the quality of the
research is bad or that they're wantonly reinventing wheels.

Good points, but things like Unix's "successor" Plan 9 hasn't really taken off beyond what the cat-v folks are doing. So we're largely stuck with the status quo.