Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mentioned a bunch of popular books, not academic works. One of them had a multi-episode PBS TV show over 20 years ago! Since then, popular accounts of various famous and obscure aspects of industry history, biographies key people, etc have become even more common - I just picked some somewhat older ones.
Popular with the folks around the office? I don't work in SV, but I like to think I work in a fairly high-skill coding environment. And I regularly have to elaborate on historical references or suggestions.
Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan
121–130 of 141 posts
Re: Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Popular with the folks around the office? I don't work in SV, but I like to think I work in a fairly high-skill coding environment. And I regularly have to elaborate on historical references or suggestions.
I'm at a bit of a loss at what to tell you. I feel like we have just about overwhelming evidence that the claim the computer industry is uninterested in its own history is inaccurate. Beyond the tiny smattering of it I've mentioned, that evidence pokes us in the eye every day from the front page of HN. The person who brought this up is apparently too busy to evaluate any evidence and you are telling me the good peopl…
In the meantime, how is the (Bayesian) evidence from one's experience to be properly measured next to the existence of books, papers, journals, conferences, videos, some with easily accessible and fairly accurate sales or views numbers to prove a level of popularity? In my office I doubt more than 20 people, perhaps no more than 10, out of the thousand or so spread across the floors (which includes many non-devs) could name over 200 Pokemon. This doesn't negate the existence of millions of people who can do that and more elsewhere, and the millions of dollars in that market. But I think it is at least suggestive about the type of people my company, and companies like mine, tend to hire. Is it really a stretch to extrapolate and make a bet that "perhaps only 2% of salaried devs can name over 200 Pokemon"? How about something just as trivial, the names of all 50 united states?
Pokemon is Pokemon, it doesn't matter much for our field, but where the widespread self-hating of one's profession comes in is that depending on one's experience the bets might not seem to be that different for things more programmers (or other roles like managers) probably ought to know about, their field's own short history just one of them. I recently quipped to someone that I doubt more than 5% of developers are even familiar with the SOLID principles thus it's not very fruitful to ask about them in an interview unless knowing about them is a hard requirement. Even fewer have a good grasp of what each principle means, and even fewer know the trivia that the L is named after a woman (with even fewer still knowing the less trivial nature of what else she contributed to our industry). Maybe I'm over-extrapolating, or a bit pessimistic, maybe I'm letting my enterprise day-job and my conversations with others at places (both enterprise and not) jade me in my expectations for what I think the "average everydev" is like.
My underlying theory is that power laws are everywhere, which means if the distributions on facets like "knows Pokemon", "knows about SOLID", "frequents Hacker News", "knows important bits of computing's history", "writes/buys/reads technical books", et al. both trivial and non-trivial are power laws then the average level would be terribly low compared to the narrow peak on one side of the distribution. The mode, which is probably what influences a lot of personal-experience feelings about the average, is lower still. If your experience is mostly around the peak it may seem otherwise.
Who's to say how much it matters anyway, it's often a pointless discussion / complaint to me. Normal laws are also everywhere, and we know that at least IQ is normal. "Smart but ignorant" is acceptable for many things, and besides, ignorance need not be a permanent condition. One doesn't need to know that Lisp machines in 1990 could do full 3D rigging, editing, and effects (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VmJVNYfxDc) in order to be effective for their Java shop employer.
Re: Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always felt we don't appreciate history very much in our industry. Why do you feel this way? ACM has had a History of Programming Languages conference since the late 70s where the well known History of Lisp paper was presented. All sorts of popular accounts are, well, popular. Soul of A New Machine was published in '81, Hackers in '84, Accidental Empires in '92, just as a few examples off the top of my head.
There’s a lot of good computer history books, but a book about the early days of Unix at Bell Labs has been missing. Glad it has finally arrived!
Re: Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan
#124I'm always amazed how well Brian Kernighan can explain things. I love the episodes on the Computerphile youtube channel with him. Recently I discovered the AT&T history channel, with this gem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0 There is a massive difference in appearance and clarity between him and the other people appearing in that video, even the "presenter"...
I go back to this video every once in a while ever since I discovered it a few years ago. I just think it is super relaxing. When I first watched it, I was beginning to use Linux and, when I opened my terminal emulator, I was like: "It's a Unix system, I know this!" The pipelines explanation was incredibly clear.
I also love the Computerphile episodes with professor Kernighan.
Re: Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Popular with the folks around the office? I don't work in SV, but I like to think I work in a fairly high-skill coding environment. And I regularly have to elaborate on historical references or suggestions.
I'm at a bit of a loss at what to tell you. I feel like we have just about overwhelming evidence that the claim the computer industry is uninterested in its own history is inaccurate. Beyond the tiny smattering of it I've mentioned, that evidence pokes us in the eye every day from the front page of HN. The person who brought this up is apparently too busy to evaluate any evidence and you are telling me the good peopl…
You're saying computer science history objectively exists.
I'm lamenting a lack of knowledge of it.
Re: Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan
#126I 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?
Brian Kernighan mentions in the book that awk provides "the most bang for the programming buck of any language--one can learn much of it in 5 or 10 minutes, and typical programs are only a few lines long" [p. 116, UNIX: A History and Memoir]. Also keep in mind Larry Wall's (inventor of Perl) famous quote/signature line: "I still say awk '{print $1}' a lot."
More background on awk from Brian Kernighan in a 2015 talk on language design: https://youtu.be/Sg4U4r_AgJU?t=19m45s
Re: Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan
#127I'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…
There's also the unavoidability of narratives, and how they influence what people look up to begin with. For example, there's a Unix history narrative which begins at Bell Labs goes to Berkeley and then out to the world; this is already extremely limited, in that it ignores Wollongong (where the first Unix port was done, to the Interdata/32, and where important work on TCP/IP networking was done) and what AT&T did wi…
Re: Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm at a bit of a loss at what to tell you. I feel like we have just about overwhelming evidence that the claim the computer industry is uninterested in its own history is inaccurate. Beyond the tiny smattering of it I've mentioned, that evidence pokes us in the eye every day from the front page of HN. The person who brought this up is apparently too busy to evaluate any evidence and you are telling me the good peopl…
Your Pokemon remark seems in the right direction, I think disagreements here are perpetually going to revolve around what one's individual experiences have been and what other experiences one reads or hears most about and how much one lets all that impact what one believes about the "average everydev". At least until the CS departments worldwide take a break from the applied math, walk over to the social science depa…
Re: Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm at a bit of a loss at what to tell you. I feel like we have just about overwhelming evidence that the claim the computer industry is uninterested in its own history is inaccurate. Beyond the tiny smattering of it I've mentioned, that evidence pokes us in the eye every day from the front page of HN. The person who brought this up is apparently too busy to evaluate any evidence and you are telling me the good peopl…
We're discussing apples and oranges. You're saying computer science history objectively exists. I'm lamenting a lack of knowledge of it.
Re: Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 po…
With an emphasis on "allegedly" sometimes. For example, C is hugely superior to Python in terms of machine efficiency. Does C support faster development cycles? That's right, you can write code that's practically as fast as tightly-optimized machine code! Does C prevent potentially catastrophic errors? That's right, you can write code that's practically as fast as tightly-optimized machine code! A lot of the True Zealots aren't quite as monomaniacal on a single narrow point, but the lack of ability to see a total solution is diagnostic.
So was ITS better than Unix? Not if you prioritize usability, support for application software, or ability to run on more than a single family of very expensive mainframe computers the world had begun to abandon by the time Unix hit its big growth phase. You can say similar things about LispMs, although they were more usable.