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The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]

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

#31

Post by delish »

uniqueid wrote: post #18

Dennis Ritchie's "anti-preface" to this handbook contains the hard-to-forget metaphor: 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 pie

And:

> Your sense of the possible is in no sense pure: sometimes you want the same thing you have, but wish you had done it yourselves; other times you want something different, but can't seem to get people to use it; sometimes one wonders why you just don't shut up and tell people to buy a PC with Windows or a Mac. No Gulag or lice, just a future whose intellectual tone and interaction style is set by Sonic the Hedgehog.

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

#32

Post by delish »

Naac wrote: post #6

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!

An excerpt from a job posting by Hal Abelson:

> Applicants must also have extensive knowledge of Unix, although they should have sufficiently good programming taste to not consider this an achievement.

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

#33

Post by darkpuma »

jcranmer wrote: post #19
darkpuma wrote: post #5

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…

> 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. 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…

> "The problem is, this book doesn't actually motivate that lesson. Instead, it spends a lot of its time sniping"

Yes but that sniping does a good job of deconstructing the historical revisionism that Unix was some beautifully architected thing, rather than something that's become less shit over time.

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

#35

Post by darkpuma »

cyberpunk wrote: post #29
systemBuilder wrote: post #22

This is a tongue in cheek but also piece of shit MIT propaganda piece mostly written by the clowns who created the abortions that were Multics and LISPMs. Like as if every software engineer should start their next project by warming up their soldering irons to add obscure new features to their CPU's! I know because I attended that school and worked with the fathers of Multics. The sad fact is that MIT produces extrem…

I'll assume you're talking about systemd here? How is linux being strangled? How is it Europe's fault? As far as I can see linux is booming and almost ubiquitous as far as backend OS's go...

> "How is [systemd] Europe's fault?"

The only way that makes sense is if they're referring to Lennart being German, but that's kind of a bullshit argument because SystemD was not some novel idea; launchd was around first and came from the American west coast.

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

#36

Post by eternalban »

delish wrote: post #31
uniqueid wrote: post #18

Dennis Ritchie's "anti-preface" to this handbook contains the hard-to-forget metaphor: 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 pie

And: > Your sense of the possible is in no sense pure: sometimes you want the same thing you have, but wish you had done it yourselves; other times you want something different, but can't seem to get people to use it; sometimes one wonders why you just don't shut up and tell people to buy a PC with Windows or a Mac. No Gulag or lice, just a future whose intellectual tone and interaction style is set by Sonic the Hedg…

"a future whose intellectual tone and interaction style is set by Sonic the Hedgehog"

Ironically, Unix won yet here we are..

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

#37

Post by musicale »

systemBuilder wrote: post #22

This is a tongue in cheek but also piece of shit MIT propaganda piece mostly written by the clowns who created the abortions that were Multics and LISPMs. Like as if every software engineer should start their next project by warming up their soldering irons to add obscure new features to their CPU's! I know because I attended that school and worked with the fathers of Multics. The sad fact is that MIT produces extrem…

Nice rant, systemBuilder. ;-)

Say what you will about Multics, but it had essentially "no buffer overflows" [1], simply because it was written in a more memory-safe language (PL/I). (The stack also grew upward rather than downward iirc.)

It also had several nice features that I wish UNIX/Linux hadn't forgotten, even simple ones such as long names for commands (e.g. list-segments in addition to the 'ls' abbreviation.)

"Thirty Years Later: Lessons from the Multics Security Evaluation (2002)", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16956386

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

#38

Post by mtraven »

I founded the mailing list the book was based on. These days I say, Unix went from being the worst operating system available, to being the best operating system available, without getting appreciably better. (which may not be entirely accurate, but don't flame me).

And still miss my Lisp Machine. It's not that Unix is really that bad, it's that it has a certain model of computer use which has crowded out the more ambitious visions which were still alive in the 70s and 80s.

Much as the web (the Unix of hypertext) crowded out the more ambitious visions of what computational media for intellectual work could be (see the work of Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson). That's a bigger tragedy IMO. Unix, eh, it's good enough, but the shittiness of the web makes humanity stupider than we should be, at a time when we can ill afford it.

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