That Ken Pier quote in the preface is still nasty work.
The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]
71–80 of 150 posts
Re: The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]
#72As 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?
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...
Re: The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]
#73We need, OTOH, the other side of the coin: The EMACS hater handbook. Under a GFDL license, of course. No multithreading, I/O locks under GNUs/eww, glacial slow email header parsing under GNUs, huge badass file for RMAIL if you don't like GNUs (instead of parsing MailDir) and so on.
True, we don't need a vi(m) haters handbook. That's just natural.
Re: The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]
#74I 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…
> I want to write a systemd haters handbook. Why ? Systemd really fits the Unix haters handbook. It is anti unix as much as it can be ( one command to rule them all, binary logs, etc). In the end it realy seems that the mantra: GNU is not UNIX is true. Just look at the GNU/Linux: pulseaudio, systemd, polkit, wayland, the big, fat linux kernel
GNU promotes Shepherd instead of SystemD.
Re: The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
On UNIX the "everything is a file" quickly breaks down, when networking, or features added post UNIX System V get used, but the meme still holds apparently. If you want really everything is a file, that was fixed by UNIX authors in Plan 9 and Inferno.
Well it depends on what "file" means. Linuxian interpretation would be that file is something you can get file descriptor for. And then the "everything is a file" mantra holds better again.
Windows is actually much closer to this limited, meaningless, form of the "everything is a file" meme. In Windows literally every kernel object is a Handle. A file, a thread, a mutex, a socket - all Handles. In Linux, some of these are file descriptors, some are completely different things.
Of course, this is meaningless, as you can't actually do any common operation, except maybe Close*, on all of them. So them being the same type is actually a hindrance, not a help - it makes it easier to accidentally pass a socket to a function that expects a file, and will fail badly when trying to, for example, seek() in it.
* to be fair, Windows actually has WaitForSingleObject / WaitForMultipleObjects as well, which I think does do something meaningful for any Handle. I don't think Linux has anything similar.
Re: The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
On UNIX the "everything is a file" quickly breaks down, when networking, or features added post UNIX System V get used, but the meme still holds apparently. If you want really everything is a file, that was fixed by UNIX authors in Plan 9 and Inferno.
I was recently thinking that object orientation is kind of everything is a file 2.0 in the form everything is an object I mean ofcourse didn’t pan out that good. Haven’t googled yet what people had to say about that already before. P.s. big fan of ur comments.
> object orientation is kind of everything is a file 2.0 in the form everything is an object
That is why I love Plan 9. 9P serves you a tree of named objects that can be byte addressed. Those objects are on the other end of an RPC server that can run anywhere, on any machine, thanks to 9p being architecture agnostic. Those named objects could be memory, hardware devices, actual on-disk files, etc. Very flexible and simple architecture.
Re: The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]
#77The good news is that we now have alternative UI's in web/mobile, microkernel-based systems, and unikernels in high-level languages... all in production use.
Re: The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was recently thinking that object orientation is kind of everything is a file 2.0 in the form everything is an object I mean ofcourse didn’t pan out that good. Haven’t googled yet what people had to say about that already before. P.s. big fan of ur comments.
> object orientation is kind of everything is a file 2.0 in the form everything is an object That is why I love Plan 9. 9P serves you a tree of named objects that can be byte addressed. Those objects are on the other end of an RPC server that can run anywhere, on any machine, thanks to 9p being architecture agnostic. Those named objects could be memory, hardware devices, actual on-disk files, etc. Very flexible and s…
I rather pick Inferno, as it improved on top of Plan 9 learnings, like the safe userspace in form of Limbo, after conclusion throwing away Alef wasn't that great in the end.
Re: The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]
#79As 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…
Didn’t Cutler design Mach?
Re: The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]
#80They certainly came up with a lot of good one-liners for this book. I wonder why Dennis Ritchie was so infuriated though. He criticizes them for wanting simple functionality, but it's not because language is a powerful tool for solving problems it's because it limits the potential of the platform to it's functionality (which has been simplified and in of itself limited). So this is confusing to me. Using language to…
dr wasn't infuriated. He would not have written a funny forward for them if he were.