[catblast]

Anybody long enough to remember Unix from the beginning or even just the last 25 years... which is a tiny percentage of this site... should know that a unifying Unix or Unix "tradition" as noted in a follow-up comment is a pretty much a myth. The tradition is whatever system you grew up on and tribal biases you subscribe to and the only true Unix traditions are mostly trivialities like core shell syntax and a handful of commands, and a woefully underpowered API for modern purposes. And long option names are definitely not part of any tradition.

Myths like "everything is a file" or file descriptor is complete bollocks, mostly retconned recently with Linuxisms. Other than pipes, IPC on Unix systems did not involve files or file descriptors. The socket api dates to the early 80s and even it couldn't follow along with its weird ioctls. Why are things put in /usr/local anyway? Why is /usr even a thing? There's a history there, but these days I don't seem much of anything go into /usr/local on most Linux distributions.

It's also ironic to drag OS X into a discussion of Unix, because if there was one system to break with Unix tradition (for the best in some ways) -- no X11, launchd, a multifork FS, weird semantics to implement time machine, a completely non-POSIX low-level API, etc, that would be it.

All this shit has been reinvented multiple times, the user-mode API on Linux has had more churn than Windows -- which never subscribed to a tradition. There's no issue of lack of familiarity here, the original Unix system meant to run on a PDP-11 minicomputer only meets modern needs in an idealized fantasy-land. Meanwhile, worse is better has been chugging along for 50 years while people try to meet their needs.

[kbenson]

> more churn than Windows -- which never subscribed to a tradition.

My understanding is that Windows has always had a very strong tradition of backwards compatibility. Even to the point of making prior bugs that vendors rely on still function the same way for them (i.e. detect if it's e.g. Photoshop requesting buggy API, serve them the buggy code path and everyone else the fixed one).

That's just as much a tradition as "we should implement this with file semantics because that's traditionally how our OS has exposed functionality".

[saagarjha]

> no X11

XQuartz if you want it

> completely non-POSIX low-level API

macOS has a POSIX layer.

[catblast]

> XQuartz if you want it

There are X server implementations for Windows, Android, AmigaOS, Windows CE!!, etc... I don't think this is relevant.

> macOS has a POSIX layer. So do many systems, again including Windows in varying forms through the years. I think the salient issue is that BSD UNIX and "tradition" are conflicting. The point of the original CMU Mach project was to replace the BSD monolith kernel.