One of my favorite sayings comes from the mouth of Henry Spencer, author of the Regex regular expression parsing library (among many other things). He said: "Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." But, what exactly did he mean by this? Well, many hackers regard Unix as the pinnacle of operating system design. Unix pieces together many ideas and technologies that make it a truly universal operating system, running on everything from wristwatches to supercomputers. The concepts and foundations on which it's based will be solid forever.

Still, every few years, someone comes along promising a revolutionary OS that discards all the old 1970s baggage and implements everything using the latest buzzwords du jour. Why implement all that old Unix gunk when you can build an OS in a version 0.0.3 language someone just posted on Hacker News? Why should everything be a file when obviously JSON is the only sensible way to store data? And who needs a filesystem anyway?

But the same thing tends to happen to trendy OSes like these. Over time, they either die off or end up becoming more and more Unix-like. The developers realize that Unix isn't actually old and clunky but is actually a rather smart design crafted by hackers with a lot of experience. Unix may have been written for the mainframes and minicomputers of the 1970s, but it was very easily adaptable to smaller devices. It's no coincidence that Unix flavors pretty much run the world now: Linux and FreeBSD on servers, Android on phones, Mac OS on many desktops and laptops. Even Microsoft is trying to get in on the action with its Windows Subsystem for Linux.

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