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The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]

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

#131

Post by majewsky »

kloud wrote: post #12
cyberax wrote: post #5

I want to write a systemd haters handbook. Like: 1. You start and stop services with 'systemctl start/stop nginx'. But logs for that service can be read through an easy-to-remember 'journalctl -xeu nginx.service'. Why not 'systemctl logs nginx'? Nobody knows. 2. If you look at the built-in help for systemctl, the top-level options list things like `--firmware-setup` and `--image-policy`. 3. systemd unifies devices, m…

+1 I think such writing would find its audience. What I would like to see is something that is to systemd what PipeWire is to PulseAudio. Before PulseAudio getting audio to work properly was a struggle. PA introduced useful abstractions, but when it was rolled out it was a buggy mess. Eventually it got good over time. Then PipeWire comes in, and it does more with less. The transition was so smooth, I did not even rea…

The reason that PulseAudio did not work at first (and PipeWire worked out of the gate), is that PulseAudio and PipeWire use a lot of relatively newer kernel audio APIs that previous sound daemons did not use. Therefore driver implementations of those APIs were untested and hence buggy when PulseAudio first started using them.

When people say "PulseAudio is not a broken mess anymore", what they really mean is "my audio driver is not a broken mess anymore".

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

#132

Post by ferguess_k »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #72
lizknope wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing I remember is from the book Showstopper https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/14150/how... [Cutler] expressed his low opinion of the Unix process input/output model by reciting "Get a byte, get a byte, get a byte byte byte" to the tune of the finale of Rossini's William Tell Overture.

Kind of crazy that what is possibly a throwaway remark by Cutler has become the basis for this whole "lore" of Dave hating Unix so much he went and made VMS (or variations on that theme). I guess it's a good story...

Damn I actually forgot where I got the "dislike Unix" line, I did read the book but I swear that is not the only source that I drafted up this question...

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

#133

Post by ferguess_k »

JdeBP wrote: post #41
ferguess_k wrote: post #39

As a side point, I believe David Cutler, the venerable OS engineer who programmed and designed three OSes, did not like Unix very much back in the 90s. I wonder what was the reason, and did he change his mind later?

It was because adding one to each of the letters in UNIX yields gibberish, but adding one to each of the letters in VMS gets WNT. Era-appropriate joking aside: There's no actual evidence that Cutler held the views on Unix, or even on DEC's Eunice, that have been ascribed to xem from anecdotes by Armando Stettner and edits to Wikipedia and writing by G. Pascal Zachary. I and others went into more detail on this years…

Thanks. Maybe I should change the question to "Which part of Unix design did D.C. think is less appropriate/desirable" to prevent fanning flames...

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

#134

Post by dark-star »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #125
dark-star wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bad argument. What does it mean to write to a mouse device? To the audio mixer? To the i2c bus device? To a raw SCSI device (scanner or whatever)? Those are all not very useful either. Especially since there actually is a very useful thing that writing to /dev/eth0 would do: Put a raw frame on the wire, and reading from it would read raw frames.

You haven't thought through what you're asking. That's the bad argument. Network packets are not viable without a destination address. Nor does anyone want unaddressed (garbage) packets on their network.

I certainly have thought this through.

Network packets don't need a destination address. Broadcast addresses exist. Also, packets to invalid/unknown destinations exist. You can send network packets with invalid source or destination addresses already anyway.

Taking a raw chunk of data and putting it on the wire as-is is the most logical interpretation of "writing to the ethernet device". Does it make sense to allow everyone to do that? Certainly not, that's why you restrict access to devices anyway.

The fact that not every chunk of data "makes sense" for every device in /dev is certainly nothing new, since that is the case for all other devices already (I mentioned a few in my post above).

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

#135

Post by ferguess_k »

RichardCA wrote: post #116

OK I have a question. I've been trying to track down a Unix book that was similar from that time period, covering command-line tools and shell programming. It had some funny cartoons in between the text. One particular cartoon featured a man who had spent too much time at the command line and was using single-word commands for everything, e.g. when he needed to send a letter he would point to it and say "MAIL" and wh…

Asked ChatGPT and it told me the book might be "The Unix Programming Environment". It happens that the second link on Google is a pdf so I took a brief look, but did not find any cartoon. I asked it a second time and it said "UNIX for the Impatient", which does look like the one but I didn't find any pdf. Hopefully it helps.

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

#136

Post by [deleted] »

zozbot234 wrote: post #120
MisterTea wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inferno was initially released in 1996, 21 years before WASM existed. An inferno built using WASM would be interesting. Though WASI would likely be supplanted by a Plan 9/Inferno interface possibly with WASI compatibility. Instead of a hacked up hyper text viewer you start with a real portable virtual OS that can run hosted or native. Then you build whatever you'd like on top like HTML renderers, JS interpreters, med…

WASI has nothing to do with hypertext though. Even WASM itself is not especially web centric, despite the name.

[deleted]

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

#137

Post by avhception »

microtonal wrote: post #127
avhception wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a German born in 87, it didn't feel _that_ recent any more. But it was definitely close, both my granddads served in the war and were scarred for life by that, mentally and physically. Family history a mess of war-torn biographies. I found some rusted, old big munition in the forest as a kid. Old bunkers and flak towers can still be seen in the cities, and many of the local kids in my hometown and age cohort adven…

I am from 82 (Dutch) and I still remember vividly visiting the border/iron curtain in 89 (just before the wall came down). My mom would jokingly put her arm through the fence and say 'my arm is in communist East Germany' (technically DMZ I guess) and my parents would tell that they would shoot people trying to cross from the other side. We often go to Germany, but this summer we went to Rügen. To get there we have to…

Some of the scars are so big, it's easy to miss the forest for the trees. A few years ago, I realized that the big cities of the Ruhrgebiet area were beautiful towns once, with amazing historic buildings. The hellscape of 60s and 70s buildings that dominates Cities like Bochum or Duisburg is a result of these cities being bombed into oblivion. It's all so very sad.

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

#138

Post by MisterTea »

zozbot234 wrote: post #120
MisterTea wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inferno was initially released in 1996, 21 years before WASM existed. An inferno built using WASM would be interesting. Though WASI would likely be supplanted by a Plan 9/Inferno interface possibly with WASI compatibility. Instead of a hacked up hyper text viewer you start with a real portable virtual OS that can run hosted or native. Then you build whatever you'd like on top like HTML renderers, JS interpreters, med…

WASI has nothing to do with hypertext though. Even WASM itself is not especially web centric, despite the name.

I am well aware of that. My point is a web browser, originally a hypertext viewer, is now a clunky runtime for all sorts of ad-hoc standards including a WASM VM. So instead, start with a portable WASM VM that is a light weight OS that you build a browser inside of composed of individual components like Lego. You get all the benefits of having a real OS including process isolation, memory management, file system, security, and tooling. WASI is a POSIX like ABI/API that does not fit the Plan 9/Inferno design as they thankfully aren't Unix.

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

#139

Post by anthk »

kazinator wrote: post #124
anthk wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bloat is not about the size (sbcl and ecl can be pretty slim for what they do), it's the spec.

To write down the full spec, you have to document everything in those hundreds of megabytes. That's going to run for thousands of pages. If your spec is small but you have hundreds of megabytes of bloat, it means you're not even remotely documenting everything.

You are really wrong. The Common Lisp Hyperspecs weights very little in my machine. 2.2 MB compressed as a TGZ.

It's really docummented. But the standard compared to Scheme it's huge.

PD: 2.2MB as HTML text weights nothing. You don't need images. It's 16MB uncompressed. More than 1500 items. People often forgets how little plain text weights.

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

#140

Post by anthk »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #128
anthk wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RMS hates Common Lisp because it's a bit bloated (tons) and the closes to GNU Emacs written in CL it's Lem and it feels far slower than Emacs.

Bloated? Sure. But slower than emacs? Strong disagreement here. I find Lem a lot snappier than emacs.

Not on my n270 Atom, even under SBCL.
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