Re: Thought I'd throw this in ;-) for the sake of conversation.

[Nick Roberts <nick.roberts@acm.org>]

Chris Humphries wrote:

> I'd rather use something that enables me to have the power to shoot
> my foot off, then slowly bleed and deny any bullet holes existed before
> you recieved it, until enough people see the holes.

Funnily enough, I have only just downloaded the full and unabridged Cygwin 
onto my Win XP machine. I actually /physically/ felt a sense of relief and 
reduced tension as I did this, knowing that I now have a real development 
environment available, rather than Windows, which just isn't.

It's hard to explain, to the outside world, how important the deep sense of 
personal empowerment (hehe) is that comes from a having proper development 
environment, to a hardwired programmer. However, I have got that sense much 
stronger from environments such as Smalltalk and even the likes of Python 
and Ruby than I ever have from Unix (and its shells).

> Think we all have done the rm mistake, it is a learning process, like
> anything else. There is nothing inheritly wrong with unix and the rm
> command, it does exactly as you instructed it to do.. easy fix: don't
> tell it to do what you don't want it to do. Ignorance is no excuse :)
> 
> It is just how it is. Unix enables you to have complete control of the
> os and with that comes an understanding that you are behind the wheel
> and should know what you are doing. Just like Ada or any other
> programming language :)

But my point is that Unix, in its entire design philosophy, runs counter to 
the design philosophy of Ada. Ada has been carefully designed to help 
protect people against accidentally shooting themselves in the foot, 
whereas Unix seems to have wilfully designed it to make this as easy as 
possible. What excuse is there for that, other than sheer mischief?

 > Some people new to unix/linux have rm aliased to rm -i, so it asks you
 > if you really want to remove what you instructed it to :)

So why doesn't rm come with the -i behaviour as default? There could always 
be a -f switch to switch it off.

> Bet your fellow student will not make that same rm mistake in a while ;)

No, I'll bet that my fellow student has avoided ever using Unix again, and 
I couldn't blame her.

-- 
Nick Roberts