Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan • Hacker News Board

Re: Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan

#101

Post by pjc50 » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 3:04 PM UTC

verisimilitudes wrote: post #27

Natales wrote: post #15

I've always felt we don't appreciate history very much in our industry. I've been lucky enough to work and hang out with some of the co-founders of very impactful projects, such as OpenStack and Cloud Foundry, and there are so many stories I've heard that I'm sure would be insightful and valuable lessons for whomever is embarking on new ideas. And yet, we all move so fast, that there is no time to stop and write them…

That's interesting, because I also feel people don't appreciate computing history appropriately. If you'd care to learn some real history, I suggest you read The UNIX-HATERS Handbook : http://web.mit.edu/%7Esimsong/www/ugh.pdf With this book, you'll learn that UNIX and C are nothing admirable and have actually been responsible for successfully destroying much better systems and languages in the popular eye; languages…

It's certainly an interesting critique, but it also massively oversells itself and is totally lacking in self-awareness if you take it seriously.

Computing is absolutely full of widely deployed working technologies that enable people to get work done all day but that have rough edges. For every one of these, there is somebody saying that you should use instead. Usually with missionary levels of zeal. And yet at no point do they seriously address why people might have good reasons for adopting the allegedly inferior solution.

Re: Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan

#102

Post by pjc50 » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 3:08 PM UTC

onei wrote: post #35

madhadron wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've always felt we don't appreciate history very much in our industry. I agree. At the same time, unless you immerse yourself in oral tradition and try to assemble a picture of the diversity of what was going on from it, it's hard to get a sense of what has happened on a scale larger than a particular community, and sometimes not even then. I occasionally think about trying to write a one volume history of computi…

I guess you could make the case that windows is written in C++, which is a superset of C which was designed while writing UNIX. Sure the OS is different, but it ended up being built from the same blocks. If we didn't have C, would we have Windows as it is today?

I don't think there's anything in the nature of C per se that's required for Windows. Any reasonably low-level compiled language would have done the same job; Pascal is potentially the nearest substitute. Windows had to construct its own executable and library formats anyway.

Re: Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan

#103

Post by greatquux » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 3:08 PM UTC

davidgerard wrote: post #83

ghostly_s wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh it's vanity press? That explains the...cover. You'd think Kernighan would have no shortage of technical presses willing to put something out on whatever terms he dictated.

The joy of Kindle publishing is that you keep all the money ;-) This is already #243 out of all Amazon, so I'd say he was correct in this ...

nice! but what's holding me back also is the lack of a digital version, otherwise i'd already have bought it.

edit: he replied to me to say he's uploaded a version today that has to be approved.

Re: Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan

#104

Post by greatquux » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 3:14 PM UTC

Regarding availability of an ebook version, I just wrote to bwk and got back a reply within a few minutes:

-----Original Message----- From: Brian Kernighan To: Mike Russo Subject: Re: please publish ebook of Unix memoir!! Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2019 11:12:48 -0400

Mike --

I have just uploaded a Kindle version, but it has to go through Amazon's approval, which could take a day. I also can't see a preview on a physical device, so I have no idea whether it will actually look right. If it doesn't, I'll have to pull it and figure out an alternative.

Brian K

On Mon, 28 Oct 2019, Mike Russo wrote:

if you get an ebook of it out there it will sell even more!! and thanks for writing it!

--

Michael Russo, Systems Engineer PaperSolve, Inc. 268 Watchogue Road Staten Island, NY 10314 Your random quote for today: ..you could spend all day customizing the title bar. Believe me. I speak from experience. -- Matt Welsh

Re: Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan

#105

Post by aasasd » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 3:35 PM UTC

LameRubberDucky wrote: post #97

aasasd wrote: post #88

The ‘Customers who bought this item also bought’ on Amazon is pretty telling: the Snowden book, a Yubikey, an electronics testing tool, coolers for Raspberry Pi, retractable Ethernet cable, wire-type soldering iron tip cleaner (what even is that), and sandalwood shaving cream.

What I saw on the first two pages of Customers who bought.... list was: Database Internals, Snowden book, Algorithms book, BPF Performance tools, Your Linux Toolbox, The Go Programming Language, The Pragmatic Programmer, Quantum Computing, A Programmer's Introduction to Mathematics, An Elegant Puzzle I had to go up to page 14 of the items list to find all of the items you listed and to find the wire-type soldering ir…

> Isn't this a bit of a cherry picked list?

I only see these items plus another cooler and a Macbook stand.

Re: Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan

#106

Post by Aperocky » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 3:45 PM UTC

kernelsanderz wrote: post #32

softinio wrote: post #13

Is there a kindle/digital/ebook version of this book? I can't seem to find it.

This is very frustrating. From what I understand of the publishing industry, the Kindle sales are not counted towards the main NYT best-seller list, so all the focus on the initial launch is around selling the physical copy. This is said to be done to prevent gamification and manipulation, but this still goes on with the hard copies also, where would-be best-selling authors often pay third-party companies to buy a lo…

Not downplaying your valid point, but I doubt a guy like bwk cares about NYT best selling list at all. It’s the history of Unix, which to us folks are basically the Old Testament, props to him for writing it. I look forward to having a physical copy of it and praying to it occasionally

Re: Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan

#107

Post by jen_h » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 3:51 PM UTC

Looking forward to reading this! Had the pleasure of seeing Brian Kernighan and Ken Thompson speak at VCF East earlier this year, totally worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY6q5dv_B-o

I highly recommend hitting up a Vintage Computer Festival if you've got the opportunity (http://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/). Not only did Kernighan and Thompson speak, but also Joe Decuir of Atari & Amiga fame.

Re: Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan

#108

Post by kabdib » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 3:59 PM UTC

acqq wrote: post #71

pjmlp wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking back at what Xerox PARC and ETHZ were doing with their workstations, maybe that wouldn't have been much of an issue.

Yes the high level language on first Macintoshes was Pascal. Lowest level was assembly. Pascal was not bad at that role, and it would have been possible to develop all the code which was eventually written in C in Pascal too. At least in the dialects that weren’t made just for education.

Apple's version of Pascal had a lot of non-standard extensions. If you squinted, it was essentially C.

Re: Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan

#109

Post by LameRubberDucky » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 4:04 PM UTC

aasasd wrote: post #105

LameRubberDucky wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I saw on the first two pages of Customers who bought.... list was: Database Internals, Snowden book, Algorithms book, BPF Performance tools, Your Linux Toolbox, The Go Programming Language, The Pragmatic Programmer, Quantum Computing, A Programmer's Introduction to Mathematics, An Elegant Puzzle I had to go up to page 14 of the items list to find all of the items you listed and to find the wire-type soldering ir…

> Isn't this a bit of a cherry picked list? I only see these items plus another cooler and a Macbook stand.

We've been analyzed and found wanting. Dang marketing algorithms.

Re: Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan

#110

Post by segmondy » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 4:08 PM UTC

QualityReboot wrote: post #47

segmondy wrote: post #11

I look forward to reading this I own and have read his following books and they were all superb! The Go Programming Language The Practice of Programming The C Programming Language The AWK Programming Language

Just out of curiosity, why awk? I've only ever used it for simple text splitting and didn't really know people did more with it. Is it a tool worth learning?

It's a tool. If you ever need to slice and dice text, AWK is great. Sure, perl is great too, but I can never remember perl and stopped writing perl. I rarely use AWK by itself, it's usually with a mixture of other unix tools.

I once wrote code with curl, awk, sed, jq, xargs and in less than 30 lines implemented something that would have taken about 200 lines of go code. I did it too in less than an hour when I was told it would take a day. It was urgent and I needed the result fast.

There are different kind of hammers, different kind of nails and screws. Know your tools, use them when it's called for. You can use a wrench as a hammer, doesn't make it a great one.