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The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]

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Re: The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]

#81

Post by BatFastard »

problems wrote: post #77
dsmithatx wrote: post #73

When I read this 20 years ago I would never have believed I'd be typing this on a Mac laptop running yet another Unix variant. This line is now so funny... As for me? I switched to the Mac. No more grep, no more piping, no more SED scripts. Just a simple, elegant life: “Your application has unexpectedly quit due to error number –1. OK?”

How does one use a Mac without grep or piping? I bought a macbook thinking I'd learn how to use it... but after 3 years, all I can do on a Mac is open a web browser and terminal.

As most developers do. Most everything else a pain in the Asteroid.

Re: The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]

#82

Post by raverbashing »

ksherlock wrote: post #75
raverbashing wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. And the last time I came across one of those I compiled and used modern tools. Because even 20 year old Linux versions had tab complete and a vi that worked with directional keys

I guess you don't AIX much.

That's one of the ones I used, so your guess is wrong

Re: The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]

#84

Post by jimktrains2 »

andai wrote: post #83

Any thoughts on UNIX security? I've been wondering what the most secure OS is for a long time, and the answer seems to be "systems that stopped being developed before you were born."

> I've been wondering what the most secure OS is for a long time

Out of the box, most system with no public services running are usually decent (and that's hard to do with some systems). Beyond that it all comes down to configuration. There is no "most secure" OS. You can set them all up to be insecure or secure.

Re: The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]

#85

Post by problems »

open-source-ux wrote: post #18

It's interesting that no one blinks twice at the thought of using a decades-old operating system - it's "mature", "battle tested", "proven over time" or some other phrase. On the other hand, programming languages that are decades old are looked upon as antiquated and not fit for modern problems, so we create new languages and discard the old ones, including forgetting useful ideas those languages contained. Sometimes…

> It's interesting that no one blinks twice at the thought of using a decades-old operating system - it's "mature", "battle tested", "proven over time" or some other phrase.

We use maintained operating systems that started decades ago - there are basically no good maintained options outside of Unix and Windows these days.

You need a seriously extreme number of testers to have a relatively bug-free operating system. We run proprietary RTOSes for some stuff at work and the number of weird bugs are crazy. We have to reboot every 280-some days because otherwise the machine will crash, IGMPv2 randomly stops working after a couple months - there's no v3 implementation at all, weird hacks just to make the thing boot, etc. And that's on top of the fact that their semi-official ports of modern open source tools don't work half the time and haven't been updated in years.

You really don't want to mess around with esoteric operating systems if you want any chance of having a stable useful application. OSes just do too much.

Re: The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]

#86

Post by notalaser »

omginternets wrote: post #14
throwanem wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They all are, but this book dates from a time when Unix had nothing like the absolute dominance of paradigm it does now. True, by the early-mid 90s, the Unix model had effectively won - but there remained a very large number of people with fond memories of other platforms, many of which did at least some things better than any contemporary or even modern Unix.

>there remained a very large number of people with fond memories of other platforms, many of which did at least some things better than any contemporary or even modern Unix. Yeah, that's what I'm curious about. Could you name names? :)

OpenVMS: distributed locking (we're barely catching up with it, in 2017!) -- see e.g. http://download.oracle.com/otndocs/products/rdb/pdf/rdbtf05_... , filesystem versioning (we still have nothing like it, and applications like ClearCase (very poorly) try to implement their own over filesystems that don't support it). ASTs (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_System_Trap ) are also great, but I think something akin to them exists in Windows.

Re: The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]

#87

Post by DonaldFisk »

walshemj wrote: post #23
omginternets wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>there remained a very large number of people with fond memories of other platforms, many of which did at least some things better than any contemporary or even modern Unix. Yeah, that's what I'm curious about. Could you name names? :)

ITS is often mentioned and I suppose PR1MOS (which was descended from ITS)

I'm familiar with ITS, but haven't heard this before, and am highly skeptical of any connexion with PRIMOS. The Wikipedia article on PRIMOS says "Legend has it that the unusual choice of FORTRAN for the OS programming language had to do with its history. Allegedly, the founders of Prime had worked for Honeywell on a NASA project. However, Honeywell at that time was uninterested in minicomputers, so they left and founded Prime, taking the code with them." ITS was written at the MIT AI Lab in MIDAS assembly language.

Re: The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]

#88

Post by david-given »

arethuza wrote: post #71
reacweb wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember it. It was far prettier than motif at that time. And Framemaker was so pleasant to use compared to Word. Both NeWS and NeXT were using Display Postscript ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript ). Do you know if NeWS was an inspiration for NeXT ?

Other than using PostScript for 2D rendering I don't think NeWS and Display Postscript had much in common. In NeWS you could write your client applications completely in PostScript (or something compiled down to PostScript) and it had its own object-oriented, multi-threaded environment with event handling etc. NeWS was more of a predecessor for Java than NeXT.

Here's the source code for the classic PizzaTool demo (BTW, I've just looked on Google Maps, and I think that Tony & Alba's pizza place in Mountain View no longer exists):

http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.txt

...and here's a link to a HN thread a few months ago where Don Hopkins talks about Postscript and windowing systems; lots of good links there:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13196983

Re: The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]

#89

Post by astine »

pjmlp wrote: post #30
raverbashing wrote: post #11

Unix is weird because it evolved organically and without a unified direction. But it remains because power and familiarity beat user experience. Yes, the "pure" Unix tools are awful, GNU improved on their usability a lot. But they're still a simple command that does something. Except Autotools. Those should burn in eternal damnation.

Except that GNU is Not UNIX and many companies still have UNIX boxes without GNU on them.

Having worked extensively with some of those non-GNU Unixes, I feel that the difference is almost academic. Even if your box comes with nvi rather than vim, it probably still has Perl, and the bash shell is likely installed if not set as the default. Overall, the feel is not that different.

Re: The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]

#90

Post by pjmlp »

makapuf wrote: post #65
lnx01 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And consequently, HaikuOS

Well, Haiku is mostly POSIX, so I'd say it's mostly UNIX. It's more than that however, and the graphical subsystem is awesome. But I'd say it's unix.

Having a POSIX API doesn't imply a UNIX architecture.
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