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The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]

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

#91

Post by david-given »

tragomaskhalos wrote: post #38
hbex5 wrote: post #3

If I ever need to feel good about myself as a software developer, I only ever need to read this book's chapter about the X window system.

An office I worked in in the early 90's had a shelf with a ten(?) volume set of X windows books - and each individual book was a thick bugger. I'd only had fleeting experience of it, but remember thinking "how complex can this thing be ?!"

I remember them --- they were really good.

The architecture was layered, too, so you typically only ever used one book at a time. Doing raw graphics operations? All you need is the Xlib book. Xt/Xaw? There's a book for that. Motif? There's a book for that, too, but it wasn't in our set.

The raw X protocol was, IIRC, documented in volume 0.

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

#93

Post by arethuza »

david-given wrote: post #88
arethuza wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I actually worked on a project that used NeWS (actually HyperNeWS) as a front end for a Lisp based AI system written in Common Lisp.

HyperNeWS could do some neat things - e.g. you could draw a shape (any shape!) in the graphical editor and paste it as the shape of a window, all without writing any code.

Edit: changed "uses" to "used" - was quite a long time ago!

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

#94

Post by fao_ »

zingplex wrote: post #19
0x264 wrote: post #8

This book is one of my top three books on how to become a good software dev :)

Could you name the other two?

They're for good developers to know and every one else to find out /jk

Seriously though, I think almost everyone has a pick of different books that influenced them the most and helped them to become the best developer that they could be, and while most of the time they are contained within a single set of books, it's kind of fruitless to buy books you might not find interesting with the promise of "They will make you a good developer". I have a fair amount of books I find difficult to read because of the style, etc. that I bought with that promise, and none of them improved my programming ability significantly more than a bunch of coding + an internship has.

[What I would recommend is finding authors that you like reading andor tend to get a lot from]

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

#96

Post by Ajedi32 »

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."

Android, iOS, and Chrome OS all have security models that are fundamentally superior to what you get on a base *nix system: Fine-grained, application-level permissions which the user can grant or deny on a case-by-case basis.

And before you say that all those operating systems are based on Unix; that's true but it's mostly just an implementation detail. There's no reason, for example, that Chrome OS couldn't be based on an entirely different kernel and still have the same permissions model, and most Unix-like systems don't have fine grained permissions like this out-of-the-box.

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

#97

Post by moomin »

I love this book. Yes, it's now out of date, but it's a) still funny and b) is a great book for learning to think about the design of systems.

The second point is sadly neglected. If you read it and your principal reaction is "Unix isn't like that anymore" you've completely missed the point.

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

#98

Post by david-given »

Philipp__ wrote: post #34

I like to cover myself with some crazy question and think about them. For example, what would look like the thing that would make people go "oh this looks good enough to replace UNIX". Don't get me wrong, I am big fan of UNIX, but I hope I will be alive around the time(but I doubt that) when we will see some new thing which will make UNIX feel dated. Now, some of you might jump and say "Oh, but UNIX already feels dat…

Really, though, Unix is just the UI over the top of the underlying operating system. Like, Minix and Linux work in radically different ways, but they both expose a Unixy/Posixy interface with file descriptors and pipes and the same execution model. Further out, Haiku is even more different; and then there are all the different Unixy front ends to Windows, which is very far from a traditional Unix inside.

Then there's stuff like Genode, which is... difficult to describe concisely, but is a capability-based OS designed for running OSes in; they wanted it to have the ability to self-host, so they added a personality for running toolchains in, and of course it's Unixy, because what else is it going to be?

https://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/11.02#Noux_-_...

So, while I agree that I'd like to see a working environment that's not a traditional Unix, I think that's a UI thing rather than an OS thing.

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

#100

Post by pjmlp »

raverbashing wrote: post #69
pjmlp wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming one has the access rights for it. I do occasionally ssh into boxes were I am a lame user without compilers installed.

Yeah, it's not always possible to compile your own tools (At least they have ssh and not telnet) What you can sometimes do is pick an alternate shell or find some other editor someone 'left lying around' (even typing vim instead of vi can give you something different) And sometimes "tab completion" works with \ or ESC or something similar, I don't remember exactly

> At least they have ssh and not telnet

Well I recently went into ones that only had ssh, but then files were also copied over plain FTP or NFS.

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