11–20 of 163 posts
This is one of my favorite books, and I own the hard-copy. As I was reading it, I found that a lot of the problems mentioned seem to be affecting Windows and macOS, while Linux based distros have them resolved. I found the commentary and history both hilarious and informative. The anti-forward by Dennis Ritchie is also very funny. If anyone has found similar CS style humor books, please let me know!
Much of the book is very dated, complaining about things that have been rectified many years ago. However I think it still has a valuable lesson that many, particularly young CS students, would benefit from: Unix is not the perfect fundamental model for computing. C is not the gospel. Their prevalence today is as much a historic and economic accident as a rational consequence of their objective merits. Both are socia…
This is one of my favorite books, and I own the hard-copy. As I was reading it, I found that a lot of the problems mentioned seem to be affecting Windows and macOS, while Linux based distros have them resolved. I found the commentary and history both hilarious and informative. The anti-forward by Dennis Ritchie is also very funny. If anyone has found similar CS style humor books, please let me know!
your book is a pudding stuffed with apposite observations,
many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough
undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain life for some.
But it is not a tasty pieMuch of the book is very dated, complaining about things that have been rectified many years ago. However I think it still has a valuable lesson that many, particularly young CS students, would benefit from: Unix is not the perfect fundamental model for computing. C is not the gospel. Their prevalence today is as much a historic and economic accident as a rational consequence of their objective merits. Both are socia…
The problem is, this book doesn't actually motivate that lesson. Instead, it spends a lot of its time sniping rather than arguing for why the entire philosophy is perhaps misguided or outright wrong. And sometimes, even the snipe targets are pretty idiotic: when complaining about C++ syntax, for example, the target isn't the incomprehensible nature of template rules [1], but one C++ compiler doesn't lex //* correctly.
[1] I'm not sure anyone actually understands how name lookups work when templates are in play. Instead there's a lot of guesswork and don't-shadow-names-if-it-might-matter going on.
I think it was jwz who said “Linux sucks, it just sucks less than everything else.”