I can't help but juxtapose this current dialog (which now includes one of the Unix forefathers) with the idea of "Worse is Better" (http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html). Maybe it's the Jersey in me but at the end of the day working, shipped software is all that concerns me.
The interesting bit here(I don't wanna say "problem"), is that we're actually a few steps further down this staircase of "let's ship". Unix wasn't exactly the purist ivory tower to begin with, then it merged with the partially compatible BSD, then we got some not-quite-Smalltalk GUIs on top of that, and now we're building elaborate web stacks on top (and/or instead) of that. And I don't even want to talk about mobile apps that in an almost unholy ceremony combine that again…
It's a Babylonian tower made of mud (some would say camel poo). But it's brightly painted and has a good view, and all your friends live in it.
Personally, I don't wanna move out either, but I still have to turn my head every time you see the paint come off somewhere…
I'm not technical, but even I can appreciate some of the very many layers beneath my web-browsing.
But, taking me typing into this text-box on HN as an example: What would the Unix way be? (If every tool does one thing and does it well, with text as input and output, and pipes to join it all together.)
Would I really have an unholy long command-line of a bunch of tools piped together (but accessed by clicking an icon)?
I'm really not the expert to ask here, my personal style is a bit too tainted for the hardcore V7/P9 fans. But it's interesting to think about, so I'll give it a try.
Let's cut to the chase: Why would you have a textbox and a specific site for what amounts to a simple discussion? There's really no big conceptual reason why we couldn't do this via email, nntp or some similar protocol.
Leaving that aside, the more difficult question is how you'd get the textbox on your screen, i.e. what's the "True Unix" way of "web browsing"? There aren't that many examples of a rather graphical, highly interactive programs that believers would classify as really Unix-like. Maybe something roff-like, where you have a pretty universal display language and different (server-side?) tools are used to create something that would be too hard to express in the language as is (cf. tbl, pic), but then how would you make that interactive without doing the same stuff as HTML/CSS/JS? I was quite fond of the concept of NeWs, where you'd distribute your application over the net as PostScript, and I think Pike's Newsqueak went in a similar direction.
And how would you handle things on the server side? I don't think it would be that much different from what we're doing now. HTTP is quite resource-oriented and thus maps closely to a file system (the path-like nature of URLs is no accident). A CGI/PHP model for simple "files" would suffice, and you could have an almost arbitrarily complex application that appears as a file system, just like you can have that now appearing as a bunch of HTTP resources. People wrote "big" C applications, even though they could've theoretically done it all with a bunch of shell scripts, awk and ed. The "one thing and one thing only" mantra never was that religiously adhered to.
So, in conclusion, I don't think we're that far off right now, especially on the server side. If you look at what Pike's complaining about, it's mostly how you do it. Quite often the wheel is needlessly reinvented or has too many spokes, it's not that driving somewhere is wrong.
I'd argue that our current system is closer to "Unix" than it would be too Lisp Machines, Smalltalk and other more homogenous systems.
No, the web server (one tool) would instantiate another tool (e.g. python/ruby/arc parser) which renders the HTML page pipes it back to the server which sends it to you. You fill out the form, press submit, the web server passes pipes those parameters back into the python/ruby/arc parser which ... etc.
I can't help but juxtapose this current dialog (which now includes one of the Unix forefathers) with the idea of "Worse is Better" (http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html). Maybe it's the Jersey in me but at the end of the day working, shipped software is all that concerns me.