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Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan

cs.princeton.edu

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

#51

Post by shakna »

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?

Awk is great for data pipelines, not just oneliners.

For a long while I maintained a program that took the compiler output (intermediate form) from one toolchain, and converted it to another (intermediate form).

Why awk? It was faster, and more readable, than any of the alternatives, whilst being much much shorter.

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

#52

Post by rajesh-s »

I agree with you on that we don't tend to appreciate history and attempt to be aware of how long things have been around. I'm looking forward to read this too!

On that note, this post reminds me of another great book (eye-opener of sorts) that I read a while ago that takes the reader through the history of some important milestones in hardware and software https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Book-Artificial-Intelligence...

After I read this, I was surprised to learn that the concept/ideas which seem very recent because of the interest/research around it have actually been around for a long time. For instance, I learnt that "Secure Multi Party Communication" has been around since 1982, Verilog since 1984, AI Medical diagnosis since 1975.

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

#53

Post by Pimpus »

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 question you have to answer yourself. I struggle to see how awk would fit into my work flow, personally, and it's not feasible to learn every cool tool. And you'd have to use it somewhat frequently or you start forgetting the syntax, unless you make Anki cards

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

#54

Post by pvg »

Natales wrote: post #31
pvg wrote: post #21

Earlier 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.

I love the ACM and everyone trying to make the effort to preserve our history. I see it from the perspective of someone working at a fast-moving, Silicon Valley-based software vendor. In that context, I don't see a lot of appreciation for history, in the day-to-day basis. But it's not because people intrinsically don't care about it. It's more about our daily lives. We not only have to do what we all have to do, but…

I suspect you might be extrapolating too far from the fact that you and your colleagues are, perhaps, exceptionally busy people.

If anything, the great speed of the industry's development has made it particularly concerned with its own history - things become history quickly, the principals are typically still around, etc. The ACM HOPL conference I mentioned started when high level languages had a total history of barely over 20 years. When McCarthy (who was surely also a very busy person) wrote his History of Lisp paper, Lisp was younger than Java is today. And as I said in a sibling comment, the interest extends far beyond industry participants - there are many popular accounts aimed at general audiences and many new ones are written at a seemingly increasing rate. There's a Computer History Museum which prides itself on its working exhibits right here in Silicon Valley. Industry history-related articles are hugely popular on HN - there's a couple of them on the front page right now.

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

#55

Post by contingencies »

msla wrote: post #39
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…

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…

FYI if anyone visits Sydney and is in to the novel experience due to an interest in Unix history, you can request a window seat on the right side of the plane to typically see Wollongong[0] down the distant coast (past the Royal National Park[1]) slightly after takeoff.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wollongong [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_National_Park

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

#56

Post by globuous »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #25
ethbro wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely agreed. It's a shame we talk past each other, when so many answers were already discovered and documented in the past. I try and keep the following in mind (even when my ego fights it). (A) I am very unlikely to be the smartest person who's ever thought about a problem. (B) Even if their technology differed, some parts of their approach are useful. (C) Clues and references pop up in the oddest places, so e…

>I try and keep the following in mind (even when my ego fights it). >(A) I am very unlikely to be the smartest person who's ever thought about a problem. My god.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution

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

#57

Post by jng »

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?

Windows is not written in C++, even if Microsoft did embrace C++ quite a bit with the infamous MFC and so on. Windows was originally written using C and assembly language, using the Pascal calling convention for efficiency. It was originally a layer on top DOS which was written in assembly language. Being a "layer" or not was the subject of a very complex federal antitrust case back in the 90s. You can read "Undocumented DOS" and "Undocumented Windows" for some weird kind of technical investigation thriller which I found weirdly fascinating back in the day.

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

#58

Post by throw56 »

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?

read the comments: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22awk%22

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

#60

Post by throw56 »

sp0ck wrote: post #38

Watching Brian Kernighan and Professor Brailsford on YT Computerfile is pure pleasure to hear and see how world look from their perspective and quite often allows to use the same principles today. We believe so much changed in his industry but some foundations are the same like 50 years ago :)

correction. Isn't it computerphile?
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