considered harmful

http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/
>2013
>using harmful software

I agree with >>2,4 on the security side of things, and hopefully making a flag for disabling and managing might be an awesome addition, kinda like pf, but for system calls too, that way you can have client servers, and masters.


But I really want to crack all the things on that site, and give reasons why or why not. Some of them I disagree, but the rest are ok. You /prog/s are welcome to contribute, and see a reasoning why or why not:

Harmful                < harmful alt                Reason|Objection
SGML,XML,YAML            JSON,CSV,ndb6,UTF8 txt            duh, all markup is already in UTF8
NFS,SMB,AFS,WebDAV        9p                    um, I know NFS & LDAP were bad hacks, but a distrubuted FS, 9p? Why not bigtable for data, and SSH in a jail for flat files?
C++,Java,Vala,D,Python,Ruby    C,Go,Limbo                No explanation needed here(NENH). The point is made obvious if OOP _must_ be used.
pthreads(PoSixthreads)        CSP-style concurrency:[e.g.]        Agreed --examples
Perl,Ruby.            rc, awk                    HAHAHA, I love the joke too. But so true, these are better alt.
PCRE                SRExps | regexps (e.g.)            Fine. As long as there is master standard for regex
Bash, tcsh, zsh            rc, pdksh, ash/dash.            add mksh & awk to the mix. scsh when ready☺
GNU Coreutils            Plan 9 from User Space            well, anything that does the basic *nix. No one wants to reinvent the wheel.
GNU Screen            tmux                    NENH. But Nicholas, why did you made the default bindings so weird? Leave a ^A default too
GNU info            Man pages                < nuff said.
GCC                8c,tcc                    I appluad their effort, but the examples are not complete. LLVM is already ahead, and it is not finished.
glibc                ucLibc,DietLibc                add musl
GNUauto{conf,make*}        mk|portable makefiles            NENH. See Line 2
Glib                libc (↑),p9p Clibs            ↸
GTK,Qt,VxWindows.        Tk,textualinterfaces            GTK+ for the GUI needy. ncurses or termbox for *
Vim,Emacs,etc...        Acme, Sam, ed.                ex-vi. sed | m4 for more wild edits ex cannot do.
UTF-*,other enc            UTF-8                    Obvious, but I never liked UTF-8, I always thought we only needed ASCII, and code page 437 when it came out.
iSCSI,FCoE            AoE                    duh. And SATA3 for more bandwith.
PAM                Factotum                Not my area, but I know PAM is a bad implementation.
Jabber & XMPP            IRC,STOMP                ALL OF MY YES. pf for protection
IMAP                SMAP                    I need to try SMAP. But I know IMAP has too much stupid things.
SQL db                Tutorial D,pq,BigTable,*nix fs        If we are talking about syntax, HELL YEAH. If we are talking about ACIDity, WTF?!? Prominently for ACID any SQL is fine, pgSQL being best, Berkeley_DB 2nd, SQLite being a contenter. I can also tolerate good Structs.
svn                Git,hg,CVS,.tar                Add Fossil to the list, any DB from the top.
FreeBSD,NetBSD,Solaris        OpenBSD                    Um, and no inferno or plan9 advertising? FreeBSD is needed for the Enterprise shings. OpenBSD as a great personal OS, certainly; maybe so server applications. NetBSD for the other devices *nix hasn't ported. This is one of the necessary evils.
Apache,lighttpd            thttpd,OpenBSD apache,nginx,noHTTP    I can only agree more. gopher is mainly what 70% of people need.
SVG                PS(PostScript)                Certianly. And to expand, pic,ideal,grn(old), & grap are better alt.
PDF                PS(PostScript), DjVu            ↖ditto.troff++
EPUB                DjVu                        ↵
ALSA                OSS4                    yep. And Midi for music format.
GPL,LGPL,Apache,MPL,CC        ISC,MIT/X,[Free]BSD,CC0,public domain    certainly, they make the most logical and technical sense. --public domain
head                sed 11q                    nice hack. I use most, and cat. This almost goes with line 17.

I don't have an opinion on the miscellaneous unix apps Uriel listed, but the bias is obvious.

On the programming language section: Did he even try D or did he lump it in with C++ because it uses as many semicolons? Complete lack of Lisp or at least Scheme which is far more simple than anything else in this list. Omits Erlang as a programming language and then lists it last (Go first, of course) in the less harmful threading models to not look like he's hyping Go hard when goroutines is basically the same thing along with the typed Limbo channels. Also on that note, I despise Go and its insistence on wasting my time with unused variable errors. Limbo is just Oberon with more curlies and Go's obvious previous attempt, nobody uses Limbo at all, every implementation of Scheme sees more active use than Limbo. Might as well advocate an obscure Wirth language which is the exact same thing down to the variable declaration syntax, the same Wirth whose language the C guys bashed in a 1981 paper. C++, Java, Python, Ruby are shitty for various reasons though, but I haven't tried Vala so I don't have an opinion on that one (someone here used to mention it occasionally).


Harmful          Less harmful alternatives
SQL databases.   [...], BigTable, plain old hierarchical filesystems.

Good grief.


Harmful         Less harmful alternatives
IMAP.           SMAP(Simple Mail Access Protocol).

Nobody uses SMAP. Considering SMTP already exists for the simple way and the scope that IMAP was trying to accomplish, IMAP is just Lisp over the wire, theres even mention of gensym in the RFC. Or, is it because Crispin made fun of le UNIX philosophy?
http://web.archive.org/web/20060110153507/http://panda.com/tops-20/