The mistakes embodied in both thus far look not just still relevant but positively timeless. Certainly, to judge by how often young people with no sense of their field's history recapitulate those mistakes.
Without specifics it's difficult to evaluate what you're saying.
What are some examples of the timeless mistakes in those programs? I think X was a pretty good effort, it's just that it essentially ossified and has been left behind compared to some more modern systems (although I'm using it right now.) Sendmail approach to dynamic configuration was sub-optimal. But these aren't examples of mistakes that I see recapitulated often.
Not every configuration system is as bad as the m4 nightmare that sendmail used, and I understand nothing really better was feasible in the prelapsarian or Stone Age days of its implementation. But I worked - fought - with sendmail for years and, as in the book, I also remain mildly surprised that Allman continues to perambulate. Most such things in my later professional experience differ by degree, not kind. YAML is not as bad as what was typically perpetrated in Perl days, but it does too much and too little and all its fiddly rules give me headaches. JSON is awful and what we're basically stuck with, because even though it's so simple it's almost useless, at least it's simple. XML is much better than it gets credit for, but nobody likes it because most programmers seem to regard the need to use a keyboard as an imposition, and I assume also have frequent nightmares featuring lots of pointy angle brackets. (I use Emacs because I don't hate myself, and I wish more people had the sense to keep things as simple as Emacs Lisp typically is.)
I don't want to talk about X. Wayland has been about 60% mistakes by volume, and I like too many of the people who made it too well to be anything other than sad about that.
I read that book in the last millenium, I wasn't inclined to go and refresh my memory just to understand your comment.
Re sendmail, when were you working with that? My reaction was just to look at it, say "nope", and used Exim instead. Perhaps the most instructive lesson here is the importance of good choices when it comes to selecting systems to depend on.
Other than that, I'm not sure what the lesson is in "people collectively decided to depend on one of the worst alternatives available." We still see that today with programming languages.
There's nothing really wrong with YAML, except perhaps the way some people use it. I classify that as "skill issue". I work with Kubernetes regularly, and its YAML usage is fine.
Something similar applies to JSON. If it's so terrible, what's better? With JSON Schema and OpenAPI, it's feature-comparable to XML now.
The problem with XML is its completely unnecessary verbosity outweighs its usefulness. I can only assume it was designed by ex-mainframe people who, unlike me, actually yearned for a return to the overengineered environments they were used to. It's no surprise that JSON and YAML edged out XML.
Emacs Lisp is an abomination. Sure, Lisp has its place historically - I had a spirited discussion with John McCarthy about that at a Lisp conference in the 2000s. I'll just mention two words: dynamic scoping. They took decades to even figure out a solution to the funarg problem, and that still didn't really fix the language. Luckily Guy Steele came along and noticed that Church had solved that problem before computers were even invented.
The mistakes embodied in both thus far look not just still relevant but positively timeless. Certainly, to judge by how often young people with no sense of their field's history recapitulate those mistakes.
Without specifics it's difficult to evaluate what you're saying.
What are some examples of the timeless mistakes in those programs? I think X was a pretty good effort, it's just that it essentially ossified and has been left behind compared to some more modern systems (although I'm using it right now.) Sendmail approach to dynamic configuration was sub-optimal. But these aren't examples of mistakes that I see recapitulated often.
I referred to the relevant chapters of a book which I named. This is the book: https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf
Not every configuration system is as bad as the m4 nightmare that sendmail used, and I understand nothing really better was feasible in the prelapsarian or Stone Age days of its implementation. But I worked - fought - with sendmail for years and, as in the book, I also remain mildly surprised that Allman continues to perambulate. Most such things in my later professional experience differ by degree, not kind. YAML is not as bad as what was typically perpetrated in Perl days, but it does too much and too little and all its fiddly rules give me headaches. JSON is awful and what we're basically stuck with, because even though it's so simple it's almost useless, at least it's simple. XML is much better than it gets credit for, but nobody likes it because most programmers seem to regard the need to use a keyboard as an imposition, and I assume also have frequent nightmares featuring lots of pointy angle brackets. (I use Emacs because I don't hate myself, and I wish more people had the sense to keep things as simple as Emacs Lisp typically is.)
I don't want to talk about X. Wayland has been about 60% mistakes by volume, and I like too many of the people who made it too well to be anything other than sad about that.
I read that book in the last millenium, I wasn't inclined to go and refresh my memory just to understand your comment.
Re sendmail, when were you working with that? My reaction was just to look at it, say "nope", and used Exim instead. Perhaps the most instructive lesson here is the importance of good choices when it comes to selecting systems to depend on.
Other than that, I'm not sure what the lesson is in "people collectively decided to depend on one of the worst alternatives available." We still see that today with programming languages.
There's nothing really wrong with YAML, except perhaps the way some people use it. I classify that as "skill issue". I work with Kubernetes regularly, and its YAML usage is fine.
Something similar applies to JSON. If it's so terrible, what's better? With JSON Schema and OpenAPI, it's feature-comparable to XML now.
The problem with XML is its completely unnecessary verbosity outweighs its usefulness. I can only assume it was designed by ex-mainframe people who, unlike me, actually yearned for a return to the overengineered environments they were used to. It's no surprise that JSON and YAML edged out XML.
Emacs Lisp is an abomination. Sure, Lisp has its place historically - I had a spirited discussion with John McCarthy about that at a Lisp conference in the 2000s. I'll just mention two words: dynamic scoping. They took decades to even figure out a solution to the funarg problem, and that still didn't really fix the language. Luckily Guy Steele came along and noticed that Church had solved that problem before computers were even invented.