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The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]

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

#271

Post by pjmlp »

tankenmate wrote: post #266
pjmlp wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course I am serious. I do UI coding since Amiga 500 days and never found so borked API, with more parameters and configuration structures than Xlib, without any support for printing or proper use of fonts. The amount of wasted hours of my life using xlsfonts.... And those bare bones widgets, yet another headache.

And yet Xlib ran happily on machines with 4MB of RAM and would only use 512K of that; mind you that was X11R3. I used to run this very config on Apollo Domain/OS machines in 1990.

The Amiga had 512KB for the whole OS, including a GUI stack way better than X.

For us targeting desktop computing, the network features of X were never relevant, what mattered was GUI toolkits for workstation usage, running on the same computer.

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

#272

Post by mikelevins »

ScottBurson wrote: post #263
mikelevins wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bear in mind that LispMs had well-designed tools for supporting this kind of development. For example, they had version control that tracked all changes everywhere at all times, even changes that were not saved in any file. Also bear in mind that they were designed by programmers for programmers. They were not intended for the general public.

> they had version control that tracked all changes everywhere at all times, even changes that were not saved in any file. No. The file system did auto-versioning, so you could generally recover recent history of a file, but there was nothing that "tracked all changes everywhere". Well, ZMacs (the editor) did have unbounded 'undo' functionality, and you could even select a function and undo changes to that particular…

Thanks for the correction. I'm probably conflating features of ZMACS undo with features of Interlisp's Masterscope.

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

#273

Post by mikelevins »

lispm wrote: post #255
mikelevins wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but the point is that there weren't any really cheap LispMs until it was too late to matter. Besides which, a system that was so much designed for programmers was probably never going to command a very big market.

There was never a really cheap Lispm. The 'cheap' ones were a Mac II + TI microexplorer or the Mac II + MacIvory. But developer workstations were always expensive - Lispm or not - or underpowered. What was also expensive was the software. I got a KEE license on a used machine I was given. I think it cost $50k. Similar Symbolics extensions for their OS could be extremely expensive. The graphics suite did cost several…

It's a fair observation that you could build end-usery UIs on a LispM. The default UI was pretty programmery, but then that's true of pretty much all computers at the time they were being introduced.

I guess a more important factor is that PCs were cheap enough to create a market for friendlier UIs, and LispMs weren't.

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

#274

Post by klibertp »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #210
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.

The thing is that it does have (or rather can be made to have) a good user experience for experienced users . The problem is the learning curve, and to a lesser extent, compatibility. MacOS is easy enough for non-techies to use while still having fast alt-tab, readline shortcuts in almost all apps (OS level I believe), and it's unixy-enough that we get things like homebrew while also getting things like Photoshop as…

> while still having fast alt-tab

Yes, but it also has a slow, not customizable animation when changing desktops, uses arbitrary keybindings you can't remap easily and generally imposes lots of choices on its users without any way to opt out from them.

I was forced to switch from a very personalized Fedora/StumpWM setup to Mac OS and it was a disaster. For the first time in decades(!) I had to pay for external programs to customize things. And even with these, there are features I simply can't disable. It's been seriously harsh. It looks like the entire platform has lost all interest in customizability but, for me, customizability is one of the basic requirements for any tool.

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

#275

Post by xorblurb »

TheGRS wrote: post #226
jackhammons wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried the Windows Subsystem for Linux?

Not OP, but I'm genuinely interested in how this experience is. What do you think of it compared to using, say, iTerm2 on OSX? I've been thinking of switching back to a Windows PC since I haven't been very impressed by OSX in the last couple of years.

It's quite impressive. Ex Valgrind runs out of the box in last Insider versions.

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

#276

Post by _19qg »

mikelevins wrote: post #273
lispm wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was never a really cheap Lispm. The 'cheap' ones were a Mac II + TI microexplorer or the Mac II + MacIvory. But developer workstations were always expensive - Lispm or not - or underpowered. What was also expensive was the software. I got a KEE license on a used machine I was given. I think it cost $50k. Similar Symbolics extensions for their OS could be extremely expensive. The graphics suite did cost several…

It's a fair observation that you could build end-usery UIs on a LispM. The default UI was pretty programmery, but then that's true of pretty much all computers at the time they were being introduced. I guess a more important factor is that PCs were cheap enough to create a market for friendlier UIs, and LispMs weren't.

> It's a fair observation that you could build end-usery UIs on a LispM.

Texas instruments ran the Interface Builder on their Lisp Machine, which was demoed to Steve Jobs and which then was developed into the NeXTstep interface builder.

> I guess a more important factor is that PCs were cheap enough to create a market for friendlier UIs, and LispMs weren't.

The higher-end commercial applications on the Lispm were kind of user friendly. Using something like the font editor or a graphics editor was not difficult. There was a problem that during its lifetime much of the UI landscape was under development - both in look&feel and APIs. There were even UIs on the Lispm that looked similar to Mac apps (like Plexi, a neural network toolkit).

Symbolics' Dynamic Windows GUI had some polish, which came from being used in some applications and it had seen some substantial investment in development. Where this investment was not done, applications lacked polish and remained experiments, demos, sketches, research prototypes, ...

TI also developed a more conventional UI toolkit for their Lispm.

> I guess a more important factor is that PCs were cheap enough to create a market for friendlier UIs, and LispMs weren't.

The market was small - I would guess that around 10000 machines were sold. Additionally the software was not portable to other platforms. CLIM was thought to support that - with some applications using it - but that was bound to commercial Lisp systems, some of them expensive... Generally I think the Lispm impact on other UI systems wasn't that great.

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

#277

Post by andrewbinstock »

dahart wrote: post #105
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?”

Ha! I switched to Mac so I could have pipes, grep and bash. I personally believe a big reason for the Mac resurgence has to do with the switch to UNIX. I was on Windows using Cygwin for years before anyone I knew was using a Mac. Then OSX came out, and all of a sudden all the academics I knew switched to Mac, and a couple years later most of the professional programmers I knew had switched. The great thing about a Ma…

> I personally believe a big reason for the Mac resurgence

Mac resurgence is more of a perception than reality. In 2016, Apple sold ~18.5M Macs, down from the previous two years [1] and off more than 10% from last year.

Granted that the Mac numbers are falling at a slower pace than the PC market as a whole, but resurgence is probably an over-characterization.

[1] http://finance.yahoo.com/news/state-apples-device-sales-1940...

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

#278

Post by gshulegaard »

grecy wrote: post #254
AsyncAwait wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The great thing about a Mac is that I get to have my user level UNIX without having to know anything about the system level UNIX. I don't need to be a sysadmin to run the thing. I get grep and pipes without having to know all the crazy commands to tweak networks settings and display timings and boot scripts. Luckily, that is basically true for modern Linux as well.

basically

Alright, I'll bite. What's missing?

I ask as I type from my Dell XPS 13" DE (aka Sputnik).

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

#279

Post by xorblurb »

dualogy wrote: post #243
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?”

> No more grep, no more piping, no more SED scripts Fedora/Gnome here. I never use this sort of stuff, and modern power users really don't have to . That's why I categorically state that practically no-one in the real world " uses Unix", even though most OS-es incl mainstream mobile ones derive directly or indirectly from it, save for Windows and esoteric ones. Do I enjoy modern Linux? Heck yeah. Do I want to use Uni…

If grepping and piping is not productive for you, you are simply doing tasks that do not require that to be productive.

OTOH working on some non-trivial code bases, maybe including system level code, typically requires grepping and piping, for at least some developers of the team, to be productive.

I too don't gratuitously use cat and touch and grep when I don't need to. I even less often use cmd stuff under Windows (using one of the dozen of bash that exists there is better for interactive command line use, when needed, on computers where I can have those), but if I need to I can do it.

Do I use Unix or not when I'm not typing into a traditional command line shell, but still using a Unix-based system as my direct terminal (or a light terminal connected to it)? "Interesting" question. Do I use an internal combustion engine when I'm driving a car? Do I use electricity when I switch on the light? I don't think we can answer any of those questions in a truly absolute way. But most of the time I would probably say yes.

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

#280

Post by klibertp »

pjmlp wrote: post #169
SSLy wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- compile stuff statically on your own hw - base64encode it - paste the encoded text over ssh to a file - base64decode it - chmod +x the decoded file - … - profit

- Mount $HOME as noexec - Disable execution bit for all directories for home - If the UNIX variant allows it, jail/contain home for each user session - Punish users or their employer if a consulting firm severely that bypass IT regulations

You also mentioned these points in your other comments here, but, to me, they look over the top to the point of being paranoic. That's probably because I lack any serious experience in admin side of things, nor of working in environments where such measures would be required.

So I wanted to ask: where such a level of security would be required? And also, what attacks does it defend from?

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