Anti-foreword to the Unix haters handbook by dmr

by noufalibrahim • 15 years ago

246 31 15 years ago

I very fondly remember this caricature from the anti-forward: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/DennisRitchie.gi...

bodyfour• 15 years ago

The Unix haters handbook was a great read (although mostly quite dated by now I think) dmr's forward was the best part though.

sfaruque• 15 years ago

Link for anyone looking for the Unix haters handbook: http://simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf

alttag• 15 years ago

Thanks. The article makes more sense now.

For example, from the preface:

  “I liken starting one’s computing career with Unix,
   say as an undergraduate, to being born in East Africa.
   It is intolerably hot, your body is covered with lice 
   and flies, you are malnourished and you suffer from 
   numerous curable diseases. But, as far as young East 
   Africans can tell, this is simply the natural condition 
   and they live within it. By the time they find out 
   differently, it is too late. They already think that the 
   writing of shell scripts is a natural act.”
          — Ken Pier, Xerox PARC

Roboprog• 15 years ago

I have a copy of UHH, and it's a funny read. It even points out some pitfalls to watch out for, at least back in the day. That said, Ubuntu now works pretty darn well, and with "Netflix in a box" devices, we're almost Windows-free at home.

I wonder what Ken Pier thought of something like NOS on CDC-Cyber back in the 80s? Now that was a rough system. "Find the program" (... OK, done, ....) ... "Now, actually run it" (2 steps!); "Compile my program" "oops, 'rewind' the binary output target" (WTF?!?) "Now compile my program so that I see the current result". And so on...

zbuc• 15 years ago

Yeow. That's a pretty harsh criticism. What alternatives were they in favor of?

pferde• 15 years ago

Indeed it was an amusing tongue-in-cheek point of view on unix.

comex• 15 years ago

It's interesting to see which parts of the handbook are dated, and which are not. Surely nobody these days would criticize Unix for crashing every few days, or complain that copy and paste doesn't work in X, or about a "massive 3/4 megabyte binary", or `ed`... but `rm` is still an irreversible operation (and versioned filesystems still esoteric). Pipes still suck, even if all the alternatives are worse. C programmers still have to deal with manual memory management...

bad_user• 15 years ago

    `rm` is still an irreversible operation

It does what it's supposed to; it gets rid of the file while freeing up space. If you don't like it, then use "git rm" instead of "rm".

    C programmers still have to deal with manual 
    memory management...

Manual memory management is still required because of our current reality. A garbage collector for instance creates a fake reality, one in which you deal with memory as if it is unlimited and extremely fast. This simply does not work for system software. It is possible and it's a romantic notion too, but just as with micro-kernels, people kind of fake it (as in, putting lipstick on a pig) otherwise you're not getting anything useful done.

I do hate Unix operating systems, but the alternatives are much worse. I also liked this quote from the article:

    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.

Well, DMR definitely preferred the bazaar.

burgerbrain• 15 years ago

The UNIX-HATERS Handbook is oft refuted, but I think you're missing the point of the GP.

Many of it's sections criticism what were at the time implementation limitations or bugs, only some of it really criticises Unix itself.

anamax2• 15 years ago

> A garbage collector for instance creates a fake reality, one in which you deal with memory as if it is unlimited and extremely fast.

Actually no, GC does not suggest that memory is unlimited let alone imply anything about its speed. Systems with GC will happily punish anyone who makes those assumptions, just like any other memory management scheme.

GC merely says that a given address may become available for reuse after the last identifiable reference goes away.

Peaker2• 15 years ago

I would really like `rm` to just deprioritize the space taken by the file, so if enough time passes and space is needed, old deleted files are reclaimed.

That is, institutionalize the idea of "undelete" -- but still allow `rm` to make a good trade-off between space reclamation and irreversibility.

Manual memory management is still useful for some things, but it seems you're implying GC is wrong in every situation? I'd say the vast majority of software today is better served by GC'd languages (That does not include many forms of systems programming, however).

eru2• 15 years ago

> complain that copy and paste doesn't work in X

I do complain that copy and paste don't work very well in X. There seem to be several incompatible intermediates stores for the cutted texts.

jimktrains2• 15 years ago

...and once you know how to use them (and why they exist), that's a good thing

chalst• 15 years ago

Security ("Oh, I'm sorry, sir, go ahead. I didn't realise you were root") still reads pretty well today. Vi might no longer read its conf file from the CWD, but the standard toolkit has plenty of SUID=0 programs: this vanilla Debian has 17 of them in /bin:/usr/bin. Of these, only sudo really benefits from being architected in this way. Cf. http://lwn.net/Articles/199004/ for another approach.

mtraven• 15 years ago

I founded the unix-haters mailing list that the book was based on, and these days I like to say that Unix went from being the worst available operating system to the best available operating system without getting significantly better. (and yes, in the spirit of the list this is no doubt unfair, biased, mean, etc.)

moomin2• 15 years ago

I've still my copy of the UHH, and my barf bag.

It remains probably one of the best books on the subject of operating system design, and all the better for being insanely opinionated.

Fundamental objections included: * It was user hostile (still is) * It didn't handle text very well (still doesn't) * The "de-facto standard" mentality where bugs are promoted as features (still present) * Lines of text are a bad model for program composability. (If you believe this is false, ask why perl exists.)

If you want to see alternatives to the "lines of text" mentality, you can look back in time to LISP machines, or just play with powershell on a windows box.

tankenmate• 15 years ago

Last I checked almost all source code is "just lines of text". Convention is what gives speech / words / code / user interfaces meaning. The Unix command line interface was designed for programmers, and in particular systems programmers; as the old joke goes Unix _is_ user friendly, it's just particular about who its friends are.

In the end though Unix doesn't concern itself with lines of text, it could hardly care, what Unix cares about (at the user interface as opposed to the kernel interface) is files with a stream of bytes. "lines of text" belongs in the domain of application programs.

podperson• 15 years ago

A lot of the criticisms of UNIX in the UHH come from LISPers with fond memories of the LISP Machine which (like HyperCard) had virtues orthogonal to the virtues of most programming environments today.

Much of the remaining criticism is of its command-line interface. The people who wrote the book were and are very much programmers and systems engineers, so the "UNIX is to 133t for too" argument is off-point. This isn't a bunch of people who think learning Microsoft Word is computer science complaining than reading man pages is too hard.

E.g. I don't know of _any_ UNIX user who hasn't been bitten by a typo with rm.

Anyway, UHH is a fun book to read, and it was nice to be reminded of Ritchie's anti-forward.

I love this line from Don Norman's actual forward:

"Unix survives only because everyone else has done so badly."

moomin2• 15 years ago

I think you misunderstand me. Program composability is the property of being able to compose programs together, not to write a program from scratch. And the philosophy of unix command line is that pretty much everything is a CSV or fixed-width data file. Which is fine until you try to do something with a config file. Basically, the unix toolchain has a really nasty text processing gap between awk and yacc, which perl, to a certain extent, filled. Filled at the expense of throwing away the unix philosophy.

As they said in the UHH, Unix doesn't have a philosophy, it has an attitude. :)

Peaker2• 15 years ago

These lines of text have very strict rules limiting what they are allowed to be.

If you try to process source code with the unix tools built with the "just lines of text" model, you won't get very far.

If you use a parser with rich data types -- you can do so much more.

Unix is not just a kernel -- Unix includes the "application programs" and criticizing their weakness is criticizing Unix itself.

jff• 15 years ago

This has always been my favorite part of the whole book:

"Here is my 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: it reeks too much of contempt and of envy."

It's quite a good book--the modern world of computing has been so strongly shaped by Unix that it's easy to forget that there are other ways. Of course, it makes me giggle when I read Lisp Machine programmers complaining about the size of Emacs (come on, guys, your machines took an hour to boot--I don't think your environments were especially small either), but it's nice to get some perspectives from outside the Gulag :) Reading the UHH led me to go poking around with old systems like ITS and TOPS-10 and VMS--mostly they just annoyed me, but I also learned some interesting things.

phillco• 15 years ago

Mine is: "C++ is to C as lung cancer is to lung".

ScottBurson• 15 years ago

Eloquent rant... that is unfortunately as applicable to itself as to its intended object.

Unix has its good qualities, but anyone who is not aware that systems before it had other good ideas that have been lost, is sadly ignorant of history.

Anti-foreword to the Unix haters handbook by dmr

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