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The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]

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

#111

Post by ebbv »

Gracana wrote: post #76
ebbv wrote: post #54

I remember when this was new and I've never found it as amusing as other people seem to. It's super easy to shit on software that's almost 50 years old. But where's the replacement? Windows is still worse as a web server platform than various Unix descendants (Linux and BSD) despite Microsoft's best efforts, and it's not free. Unix has its flaws but being a "Unix hater" is just dumb.

UHH absolutely does not attack UNIX for being old. See "Who We Are" in the preface. The authors worked with systems they felt were superior in many ways, until industry/economic forces pushed them to UNIX. "This book is about people who are in abusive relationships with UNIX, woven around the threads in the UNIX-HATERS mailing list." They're not a bunch of angry outsiders, they're UNIX insiders who reject the idea of…

I wasn't saying they were attacking it because it is 50 years old, I said it's easy to attack something that is 50 years old. Computer science and systems design has evolved a lot since then, so of course there were a lot of decisions made then that we wouldn't do now. And a lot of things evolved organically in UNIX, etc.

Anyway, I'm not gonna rehash the same old arguments with you.

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

#112

Post by pjmlp »

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.

> How does one use a Mac without grep or piping?

Using Finder, XCode, Objective-C and Swift frameworks,...

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

#113

Post by raverbashing »

pjmlp wrote: post #100
raverbashing wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh yeah

What was more amazing was people using X for accessing a terminal. You know, because that's how someone told to use it, so they just went with the flow.

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

#114

Post by omginternets »

throwanem wrote: post #42
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? :)

Lisp machines turn up pretty frequently in this context, and I understand why - some of their capabilities still haven't been replicated anywhere else, nor are they likely to be, and that's a real loss; in particular, there is a great deal to be said for a model in which changing the behavior of the running system, right down to the microcode, can be as simple as writing up the changes you want and evaluating them. N…

Very interesting, thanks. Why do you suppose Lisp-M isn't more widely used?

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

#115

Post by heinrich5991 »

mi100hael wrote: post #106
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.

"Autotools is the worst form of build system, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." -Churchill, probably In all seriousness, what's your preferred alternative? Seems like Autotools is a pain, but it gets the job done and is widely available. I haven't found a build system for C projects that is: - Less complicated - Available from default package repos so others who clone don't hav…

You could try cmake. :)

It also has better Windows support than autotools.

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

#116

Post by tonyedgecombe »

pjmlp wrote: post #24
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.

Everyone that dislikes Win32 should program directly with Xlib and Athena, and rejoice of the experience.

Win32 with function signatures that look like this:

  HWND WINAPI CreateWindowEx(
    _In_     DWORD     dwExStyle,
    _In_opt_ LPCTSTR   lpClassName,
    _In_opt_ LPCTSTR   lpWindowName,
    _In_     DWORD     dwStyle,
    _In_     int       x,
    _In_     int       y,
    _In_     int       nWidth,
    _In_     int       nHeight,
    _In_opt_ HWND      hWndParent,
    _In_opt_ HMENU     hMenu,
    _In_opt_ HINSTANCE hInstance,
    _In_opt_ LPVOID    lpParam
  );
The only redeeming feature is the documentation.

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

#118

Post by mi100hael »

heinrich5991 wrote: post #115
mi100hael wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Autotools is the worst form of build system, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." -Churchill, probably In all seriousness, what's your preferred alternative? Seems like Autotools is a pain, but it gets the job done and is widely available. I haven't found a build system for C projects that is: - Less complicated - Available from default package repos so others who clone don't hav…

You could try cmake. :) It also has better Windows support than autotools.

> - Less complicated

;) cmake is actually exactly what I had in mind when I wrote that. Maybe I haven't used it enough, but I find it basically just trades Makefile.am everywhere for CMakeLists.txt everywhere.

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

#119

Post by problems »

pjmlp wrote: post #112
problems wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> How does one use a Mac without grep or piping? Using Finder, XCode, Objective-C and Swift frameworks,...

Bluh, don't get me started on Finder. Icons in directories would randomly be overlapping just because I hadn't been in them in a while and new files were added, they added this weird tagging system with colors that just doesn't make sense to me at all, it randomly thinks I want to view some sort of "recently used files and some random shit" list instead of my homedir. I don't know what the devs of it were thinking. Even bone stock Windows Explorer seems better. Easier to understand what's going on at least. I don't know why people seem to think Apple is some sort of UI god when they can't even make a usable file manager.

Objective-C looks like a clusterfuck and I never want to touch it. Swift seems like a quite good solution to that and I hope it eventually becomes the full replacement - but now more non-Apple laptops have high DPI screens, so I don't think I'll be around to see it happen.

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

#120

Post by pjmlp »

gingerbread-man wrote: post #59

For all of the usability flaws pointed out here, to what would you ascribe Unix's proliferation and modern ubiquity? - Giving it away to universities? - The C programming language? What am I missing?

Giving it away to universities.

All the alternatives had lots of zeros on their price tags.

C just came along, like JavaScript on the browser.

We already had better system programming languages since Burroughs B5000 in the 60's.

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