MAmananaysiempre·Oct 19, 2023
The implicit point of comparison looks to be the monolithic Unix of old, where the entirety of the code of the system is (hopefully, ostensibly, allegedly) developed with a single vision, except for the application programs in the narrowest sense of the word (e.g. the particular piece of numerics you needed to design your airplane or whatnot, but not the editor you used to write it, the cluster scheduler you used to run it, the typesetter you used to write down your results, or the 3D viewer you used to present them).
As far as I understand, that—compared to the Linux distro which derives a similar range of capability from a primordial soup of small nuggets of software—was Raymond’s “cathedral” as well, and the original model of the BSDs, before the range of expected functionality was broad enough that distro-ish “ports” became unavoidabl
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One example that’s just plain interesting to read to see what things people were exploring (because, let’s admit it, historical Unix source gets plain boring after a while) is AT&T Research’s https://github.com/att/ast.