Live data from Hacker News

The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]

web.mit.edu

281–290 of 316 posts

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

#281
post #5

can anyone give a first-hand historical perspective on this, regarding what was going on and how this was seen in 1994?

It was written in an age where there were still plenty of computer options to go around with. On the consumer and small business end, there were DOS/Windows boxes, WindowsNT boxes, and Macs, of course. But OS/2 was still a thing, Win95 was around the corner, and, while on the decline by 1994, Atari and Amiga devices were still somewhat sensible options for e.g. music or gaming a few years earlier. On the corporate en…

I saw the anti-forward, but missed that quote. Thanks for pointing it out, and for the thoughtful blurb. Great context!

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

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Win32 with function signatures that look like this: HWND WINAPI CreateWindowEx( _In_ DWORD dwExStyle, _In_opt_ LPCTSTR lpClassName, _In_opt_ LPCTSTR lpWindowName, _In_ DWORD dwStyle, _In_ int x, _In_ int y, _In_ int nWidth, _In_ int nHeight, _In_opt_ HWND hWndParent, _In_opt_ HMENU hMenu, _In_opt_ HINSTANCE hInstance, _In_opt_ LPVOID lpParam ); The only redeeming feature is the documentation.

"The only redeeming feature is the documentation." Lmao. That's close to what I said when I first learned it. I was griping about how complicated window creation was vs some tools I had. "The MSDN docs are awesome, though!"

I never get why some people think the Win32 MSDN doc are appropriate. They are typically several order of magnitude less precise than man-pages on function about a similar topic -- if not just containing a few errors!

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

#283
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-sale…

I think the resurgence refers to the market share Apple gained since the OS9 days.

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

#285
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-sale…

In this context, I think "Mac resurgence" refers to the Mac coming back from the dead over the past 20 years, not recent sales figures.

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

#286

see also: The Unix haters' UNIXUX server. It's pretty funny. http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/login.html

It was more realistic back when the tag worked: UNIXUX: Click on the cursor. UNIX HATERS Release 2.0 (unixux) login: _

CSS to the rescue! :) https://jsfiddle.net/54bpngL3/

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

#287
post #76
post #54

I remember when this was new and I've never found it as amusing as other people seem to. It's super easy to shit on software that's almost 50 years old. But where's the replacement? Windows is still worse as a web server platform than various Unix descendants (Linux and BSD) despite Microsoft's best efforts, and it's not free. Unix has its flaws but being a "Unix hater" is just dumb.

UHH absolutely does not attack UNIX for being old. See "Who We Are" in the preface. The authors worked with systems they felt were superior in many ways, until industry/economic forces pushed them to UNIX. "This book is about people who are in abusive relationships with UNIX, woven around the threads in the UNIX-HATERS mailing list." They're not a bunch of angry outsiders, they're UNIX insiders who reject the idea of…

Worse is Worse negates the aspects that purity in the vacuum is very pure and very useless. There is (extreme) value in network effects, and network effects also exists in technology, not only in social networks... (and well, in technical fields, both are related). Also it's extremely easy to keep only good memories of extinct systems, and remain focused on past defaults, that for the most part have been largely corrected or at least compensated by dozen of years of refinement on still alive systems.

I don't negate that there are some technical choices that are better than others in some context, or even in some cases in every aspects. But e.g. the PC loser-ing problem has in practice hardly caused much problems (and is even in some cases a superior approach even for the userspace), and judging systems by that kind of details can easily be compared to an hypothetical crazy mechanical engineer not buying a car because of an obscur mechanical technical detail in the engine, that has been made to work perfectly well by taking into account its peculiarities, but that he dislike by principle and in an absolute way.

I'm also very aware of the enormously costly impact of some de facto industry choices. For ex: the C language and its derivative are shit and have arguably costed an absurd amount to the human kind -- compared to a technological-fiction world where safer languages would have been used. Does that mean that this is a case of "Worse is better"? Maybe, but then what would it mean? We have processors with MMU, we even have IOMMU that are becoming more and more common. Given some existing software stacks this does not need to be an intrinsically requirement -- but IMO this is vastly better. Can Worse sometimes win, and then Better also win on other subjects? What should we deduce from that then? What insight can we extract? If none, this whole categorization would be meaningless.

So in some cases, "Worse" is actually just better, the "worse" in question only being in the eyes of the opponent. Or you need to be extremely precise about the criterion you are using.

But I prefer to stick to consider all the advantages and drawbacks of what I'm talking about, the situation I want to apply it to, and avoid binary categorizations when they have no predictive value.

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

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Postscript isn't a complex language. It's probably quite straightforward to translate it into Javascript and run it locally on a web browser, rendering into a canvas. With a websocket connection to the backend, it'd be possible to recreate NeWS and use it for traditional client/server Unix apps, but with an ordinary web browser instead of an X server. I don't know whether this would be useful , mind, other than being…

Omar Rizwan has been developing a project called "dewdrop" [1] [2] to re-implement NeWS in the web browser, using canvas to render the graphics. It's based on the WPS PostScript interpreter [3], which he's rewritten and extended in TypeScript. He says: "It's _very_ incomplete (not many events, multi-canvas support unclear, no GUI toolkit, no network stuff), but a surprising amount of the core stuff is in, I think (co…

Ha. Of course it wasn't an additional idea. Thanks --- will check it out!

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

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The only redeeming feature is the documentation." Lmao. That's close to what I said when I first learned it. I was griping about how complicated window creation was vs some tools I had. "The MSDN docs are awesome, though!"

I never get why some people think the Win32 MSDN doc are appropriate. They are typically several order of magnitude less precise than man-pages on function about a similar topic -- if not just containing a few errors!

They helped me a lot. Especially the code examples for various API functions. That simple.

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

#290
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

basically

Alright, I'll bite. What's missing? I ask as I type from my Dell XPS 13" DE (aka Sputnik).

It's mostly hardware support still. As an example, try using a Baytrail/CherryTrail laptop with Windows 10. Now try in Ubuntu. Oh you need Linux 4.11. Oh that's not out yet, so you need to run a bleeding edge kernel directly from git. Even Ubuntu 17.04 is supposed to ship with 4.10 so you'll have to wait until Ubuntu 17.10 before your hardware might be usable.
Post reply on HN