14 ms·

Everyone should, at some point, read The Unix-Haters Handbook. A great deal of it is outdated or simply wrong, but it does have a running theme of a prediction

Everyone should, at some point, read The Unix-Haters Handbook. A great deal of it is outdated or simply wrong, but it does have a running theme of a prediction that has largely been borne out: people assuming that all Unix's flaws are actually virtues and that if you don't think so, then you Just Don't Get It. It's not hard to see how this happened: since pretty much all computers that people normally interact with are either running Windows or a Unix-like system, it has set up a dichotomy in people's minds. When the Unix-Haters Handbook was released, there were still other operating systems which could have a plausible claim to being better, but they have all faded away, leaving only these two. And since the "Real Hackers" prefer Unix, Unix and all its decisions must be the right ones. Unix is great, but people need to be more realistic about its shortcomings instead of mindlessly repeating mantras about "The Unix Way" without critical examination.

jff 10y ago
Having configured and used VMS, I feel I can conclusively say that the people in TUHH who preferred it to Unix were out of their goddamn minds.
- Isamu 10y ago
  Oh my god yes. That and various other operating systems I can think of that I had the misfortune to develop on. Thankfully they died out long ago.
- protomyth 10y ago
  To defend VMS, if you have to have an always up with hot backup and multi-machine cluster that you can upgrade without affecting the cluster, OpenVMS is quite nice. As a developer, it was a bit painful, but the whole file versioning was handy sometimes.
CalChris 10y ago
I did not know about this! http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf It even has an anti-foreword by Dennis Ritchie which kinda reminds me of the Metropolitan Police spokesman's blurb on the back of Banksy's book. BTW, it starts off with an anonymous quote that I've never heard, Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. Unix is of course from Bell Labs. And anyone who knew anything would have said instead, Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and BSD which at least would have been funny if still inaccurate. Anyways, it seems like a fun rant of a book which I'd never heard of. The above point about not getting it can be applied to Linux as well. Lessons learned elsewhere are stupid until Linus finally understands them and then they're obvious.
- haberman 10y ago
  From the book: "Did you know that all the standard Sun window applications (“tools”) are really one massive 3/4 megabyte binary?" Oh for the days when 750kB was considered "massive" for a binary.
  - Koshkin 10y ago
    IIRC, the original (1969) version of UNIX was designed to run on a computer with 24 kilobytes of RAM.
    - AceJohnny2 10y ago
      Oh the days without process isolation and memory management.
    - aap_ 10y ago
      The original UNIX ran on a PDP-7, which didn't have bytes. The memory was 8k of 18 bit words.
  - VintageCool 10y ago
    Heh. That reminds me of the article from last year that Apple was distributing many Unix programs as a single binary. https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2016/04/17/unprotected/ https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2016/04/17/unprotected/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11517894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11517894
  - brandmeyer 10y ago
    cough cough Busybox cough
- jff 10y ago
  The whole document is great but the anti-forward is so good I'm going to risk downvotes by reproducing it in its (short) entirety here, emphasis mine: From: dmr@plan9.research.att.com Date: Tue, 15 Mar 1994 00:38:07 EST Subject: anti-foreword To the contributers to this book: I have succumbed to the temptation you offered in your preface: I do write you off as envious malcontents and romantic keepers of memories. The systems you remember so fondly (TOPS-20, ITS, Multics, Lisp Machine, Cedar/Mesa, the Dorado) are not just out to pasture, they are fertilizing it from below. Your judgments are not keen, they are intoxicated by metaphor. In the Preface you suffer first from heat, lice, and malnourishment, then become prisoners in a Gulag. In Chapter 1 you are in turn infected by a virus, racked by drug addiction, and addled by puffiness of the genome. Yet your prison without coherent design continues to imprison you. How can this be, if it has no strong places? The rational prisoner exploits the weak places, creates order from chaos: instead, collectives like the FSF vindicate their jailers by building cells almost com- patible with the existing ones, albeit with more features. The journalist with three undergraduate degrees from MIT, the researcher at Microsoft, and the senior scientist at Apple might volunteer a few words about the regulations of the prisons to which they have been transferred. 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. You claim to seek progress, but you succeed mainly in whining. 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. Bon appetit!
lisper 10y ago
There are interesting parallels between operating systems and political parties here, and this is not a coincidence: both operating systems and political parties are infrastructure, and infrastructure is really hard both to build and to replace once it has become established. So in both cases you see a lot of rationalization about how the existing solutions are perfectly OK even though they are not simply because no one wants to do the heavy lifting (and in both cases it is very heavy lifting) required to actually come up with something better.
- 7952 10y ago
  Political parties present an abstract view of how society works that simplifies the complexity of the underlying system. It offers a set of interfaces that allow a large mass of untrusted individuals to influence the whole.
  - smitherfield 10y ago
    Interestingly, nearly all third parties differentiate themselves by offering up even more simplistic abstractions, even more inflexible and unfalsifiable. It seems to be a core part of human nature to look for comfort in such abstractions.
eternalban 10y ago
> flaws are actually virtues and that if you don't think so, then you Just Don't Get It. Hey, that sounds like Go's line. Oh wait ..
- CalChris 10y ago
  Sounds just like Rust as well.
  - moosingin3space 10y ago
    Literally have never heard Rustaceans defend poor design choices like that before.
    - CalChris 10y ago
      Well, if you don't get that someone else might see something as a flaw then perhaps you wouldn't understand that you may be defending a bad design choice. I use Rust. There's a bunch of things I do not like about Rust. Its macro language is nigh on unusable. A macro language should be an expedient; it should allow you to get textual things done, committing necessary atrocities along the way knowing that the result must still pass muster with the compiler. It isn't supposed to remind you of a 61A midterm. I like the safety and that is why I use Rust. I don't get adding functional programming to a systems programming language.
      - wahern 10y ago
        M4 is a standard POSIX utility and it's Turing complete. It's difficult to out-class recursive string macro expansion for sheer simplicity and sheer ability to confuse the heck out of yourself. Alas, while it's a mandatory POSIX utility (AFAIU), some Linux distributions have saw fit to remove it from base installs.
      - moosingin3space 10y ago
        I never said Rustaceans don't see flaws or that they don't defend bad choices. But I've never seen someone say "if you don't think so, then you Just Don't Get It" or any variant thereof in the Rust community.
nickbauman 10y ago
I love motorcycles too. I've owned many sophisticated bikes: Ducatis with their strange Desmodromic heads. With the ability to dial an exchange of torque to horsepower at the handlebars. Buells with their fuel-in-frame chassis. My current Suzuki even has 4 sensors in the airbox alone. One that measures the air input pressure. One that measures the oxygen level. One that measures the air temperature. Really amazing performance. It will be in a junkyard within ten years though. I won't be able to find those sensors in a few years. So all that new and advanced technology doesn't really interest me anymore. I'm looking for a 1969 Honda CL350 right now. They're still around and running fine. They're much simpler and much more maintainable. No Engine Computer. No sensors. Everything really easy to understand. I kinda want my OS like that too. With all its warts I can keep it running.
- mastax 10y ago
  What OS would be analogous to the Honda in your example? OpenBSD? Plan9? Not Linux, surely. That would be more like the Suzuki, but it used to be an older bike so they left the carburetor in there and next year someone will add an electric motor too.
  - eikenberry 10y ago
    Any free software OS can meet his requirements as they all are transparent to anyone with the time to learn, just like the older bikes. The problem with modern bikes is that all the advanced tech is proprietary and you have no way of understanding it or tinkering with it. IMO you can take any modern distro and strip it down to something understandable. It just takes some time to learn how to strip it down and how what's left works (and this is ongoing, as things are always changing). I'm not saying it's trivial, but neither is learning how to rebuild a motorcycle.
    - nickbauman 10y ago
      Excellent extension to the original analogy.
    - SFJulie 10y ago
derefr 10y ago
> since pretty much all computers that people normally interact with are either running Windows or a Unix-like system, it has set up a dichotomy in people's minds I really wish undergraduate Software Engineering programs included a course that was a survey of operating systems, where you'd write the same program (that did a lot of IPC) on, say, base WinNT (kernel objects with ACLs!); base Darwin (Mach ports!); a unikernel framework like MirageOS; something realtime like QNX; the Java Card platform for smart-cards; and so forth. Maybe even include something novel, like http://genode.org http://genode.org.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  My CS degree did something like that, both for programming languages and OSes. I eventually got very surprised that not all universities do that.
  - aktau 10y ago
    Where was that, if I may ask?
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      In Portugal early 90's, FCT/UNL.
atombender 10y ago
The famous "each tool does just one thing well" mantra is also a depressingly overblown myth. Among the current Unix tools, there is a ridiculous amount of overlap. That's why we have both "ls" and "find", even though they do the same thing conceptually. "ps" has column output, but the way it formats, sorts, selects etc. columns is reinvented and not transferable to other tools such as "lsof" and "netstat", not to mention "top", which of course is just a self-updating "ps". Every tool invents filtering, sorting, formatting etc. in their own unique way. The various flags are not translatable to other tools. I've never used Powershell, but it seems to get one thing right that Unix never bothered to. Tools should emit data, or consume data, or display data, but tools should never do all three, because they will invariably reimplement something poorly that has been done elsewhere.
- int_19h 10y ago
  Powershell did one thing wrong, in that its tools emit objects, not data. In other words, they emit data with behavior (methods). This, in turn, imposes the CLR object and memory model on the whole thing, and makes the pipeline impossible to use between distinct processes. The right way to do this is to pick some reasonable text-based structured interchange format - s-exprs, JSON, whatever. Actually, it wouldn't be a bad thing to have a binary protocol as well, so long as all that complexity is negotiable, and is implemented by the standard library.
  - lobster_johnson 10y ago
    Agreed. One huge benefit to a text format is that you can generate small "ad hoc" snippets (e.g. echo) easily. Otherwise I'd love something like Protocol Buffers here.
  - EdiX 10y ago
    The problem here is that most unix tools (ls being the exception) do double duty, they both emit output for other programs and output for the user. Which one you get and how the user output is presented being controlled by flags. If you want them to only emit data in a standardized format you are implicitly cutting out the user. Since direct use by a human is arguably the main use case, output formatting needs to be reindtroduced somehow. You could make some adapter that you always pipe into that handles most formatting concerns but it's unlikely that it will be truly general. The only general way to do that is for the tool to output, along with the data, also some code that can be used to properly format the data. So there are only three ways to solve this: * Unix solution, with tools doing double duty and each tool having its own incompatible set of flags * Actual programming language solution, tools emit pure data. Great for programming, bad for interactive use. * Powershell solution, programs emit data+code: you are locked into some VM.

jff 10y ago

Having configured and used VMS, I feel I can conclusively say that the people in TUHH who preferred it to Unix were out of their goddamn minds.

Isamu 10y ago
Oh my god yes. That and various other operating systems I can think of that I had the misfortune to develop on. Thankfully they died out long ago.
protomyth 10y ago
To defend VMS, if you have to have an always up with hot backup and multi-machine cluster that you can upgrade without affecting the cluster, OpenVMS is quite nice. As a developer, it was a bit painful, but the whole file versioning was handy sometimes.

CalChris 10y ago

I did not know about this! http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf It even has an anti-foreword by Dennis Ritchie which kinda reminds me of the Metropolitan Police spokesman's blurb on the back of Banksy's book. BTW, it starts off with an anonymous quote that I've never heard, Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. Unix is of course from Bell Labs. And anyone who knew anything would have said instead, Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and BSD which at least would have been funny if still inaccurate. Anyways, it seems like a fun rant of a book which I'd never heard of. The above point about not getting it can be applied to Linux as well. Lessons learned elsewhere are stupid until Linus finally understands them and then they're obvious.

haberman 10y ago
From the book: "Did you know that all the standard Sun window applications (“tools”) are really one massive 3/4 megabyte binary?" Oh for the days when 750kB was considered "massive" for a binary.
- Koshkin 10y ago
  IIRC, the original (1969) version of UNIX was designed to run on a computer with 24 kilobytes of RAM.
  - AceJohnny2 10y ago
    Oh the days without process isolation and memory management.
  - aap_ 10y ago
    The original UNIX ran on a PDP-7, which didn't have bytes. The memory was 8k of 18 bit words.
- VintageCool 10y ago
  Heh. That reminds me of the article from last year that Apple was distributing many Unix programs as a single binary. https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2016/04/17/unprotected/ https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2016/04/17/unprotected/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11517894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11517894
- brandmeyer 10y ago
  cough cough Busybox cough
jff 10y ago
The whole document is great but the anti-forward is so good I'm going to risk downvotes by reproducing it in its (short) entirety here, emphasis mine: From: dmr@plan9.research.att.com Date: Tue, 15 Mar 1994 00:38:07 EST Subject: anti-foreword To the contributers to this book: I have succumbed to the temptation you offered in your preface: I do write you off as envious malcontents and romantic keepers of memories. The systems you remember so fondly (TOPS-20, ITS, Multics, Lisp Machine, Cedar/Mesa, the Dorado) are not just out to pasture, they are fertilizing it from below. Your judgments are not keen, they are intoxicated by metaphor. In the Preface you suffer first from heat, lice, and malnourishment, then become prisoners in a Gulag. In Chapter 1 you are in turn infected by a virus, racked by drug addiction, and addled by puffiness of the genome. Yet your prison without coherent design continues to imprison you. How can this be, if it has no strong places? The rational prisoner exploits the weak places, creates order from chaos: instead, collectives like the FSF vindicate their jailers by building cells almost com- patible with the existing ones, albeit with more features. The journalist with three undergraduate degrees from MIT, the researcher at Microsoft, and the senior scientist at Apple might volunteer a few words about the regulations of the prisons to which they have been transferred. 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. You claim to seek progress, but you succeed mainly in whining. 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. Bon appetit!

lisper 10y ago

There are interesting parallels between operating systems and political parties here, and this is not a coincidence: both operating systems and political parties are infrastructure, and infrastructure is really hard both to build and to replace once it has become established. So in both cases you see a lot of rationalization about how the existing solutions are perfectly OK even though they are not simply because no one wants to do the heavy lifting (and in both cases it is very heavy lifting) required to actually come up with something better.

7952 10y ago
Political parties present an abstract view of how society works that simplifies the complexity of the underlying system. It offers a set of interfaces that allow a large mass of untrusted individuals to influence the whole.
- smitherfield 10y ago
  Interestingly, nearly all third parties differentiate themselves by offering up even more simplistic abstractions, even more inflexible and unfalsifiable. It seems to be a core part of human nature to look for comfort in such abstractions.

eternalban 10y ago

> flaws are actually virtues and that if you don't think so, then you Just Don't Get It. Hey, that sounds like Go's line. Oh wait ..

CalChris 10y ago
Sounds just like Rust as well.
- moosingin3space 10y ago
  Literally have never heard Rustaceans defend poor design choices like that before.
  - CalChris 10y ago
    Well, if you don't get that someone else might see something as a flaw then perhaps you wouldn't understand that you may be defending a bad design choice. I use Rust. There's a bunch of things I do not like about Rust. Its macro language is nigh on unusable. A macro language should be an expedient; it should allow you to get textual things done, committing necessary atrocities along the way knowing that the result must still pass muster with the compiler. It isn't supposed to remind you of a 61A midterm. I like the safety and that is why I use Rust. I don't get adding functional programming to a systems programming language.
    - wahern 10y ago
      M4 is a standard POSIX utility and it's Turing complete. It's difficult to out-class recursive string macro expansion for sheer simplicity and sheer ability to confuse the heck out of yourself. Alas, while it's a mandatory POSIX utility (AFAIU), some Linux distributions have saw fit to remove it from base installs.
    - moosingin3space 10y ago
      I never said Rustaceans don't see flaws or that they don't defend bad choices. But I've never seen someone say "if you don't think so, then you Just Don't Get It" or any variant thereof in the Rust community.

nickbauman 10y ago

I love motorcycles too. I've owned many sophisticated bikes: Ducatis with their strange Desmodromic heads. With the ability to dial an exchange of torque to horsepower at the handlebars. Buells with their fuel-in-frame chassis. My current Suzuki even has 4 sensors in the airbox alone. One that measures the air input pressure. One that measures the oxygen level. One that measures the air temperature. Really amazing performance. It will be in a junkyard within ten years though. I won't be able to find those sensors in a few years. So all that new and advanced technology doesn't really interest me anymore. I'm looking for a 1969 Honda CL350 right now. They're still around and running fine. They're much simpler and much more maintainable. No Engine Computer. No sensors. Everything really easy to understand. I kinda want my OS like that too. With all its warts I can keep it running.

mastax 10y ago
What OS would be analogous to the Honda in your example? OpenBSD? Plan9? Not Linux, surely. That would be more like the Suzuki, but it used to be an older bike so they left the carburetor in there and next year someone will add an electric motor too.
- eikenberry 10y ago
  Any free software OS can meet his requirements as they all are transparent to anyone with the time to learn, just like the older bikes. The problem with modern bikes is that all the advanced tech is proprietary and you have no way of understanding it or tinkering with it. IMO you can take any modern distro and strip it down to something understandable. It just takes some time to learn how to strip it down and how what's left works (and this is ongoing, as things are always changing). I'm not saying it's trivial, but neither is learning how to rebuild a motorcycle.
  - nickbauman 10y ago
    Excellent extension to the original analogy.
  - SFJulie 10y ago

derefr 10y ago

> since pretty much all computers that people normally interact with are either running Windows or a Unix-like system, it has set up a dichotomy in people's minds I really wish undergraduate Software Engineering programs included a course that was a survey of operating systems, where you'd write the same program (that did a lot of IPC) on, say, base WinNT (kernel objects with ACLs!); base Darwin (Mach ports!); a unikernel framework like MirageOS; something realtime like QNX; the Java Card platform for smart-cards; and so forth. Maybe even include something novel, like http://genode.org http://genode.org.

pjmlp 10y ago
My CS degree did something like that, both for programming languages and OSes. I eventually got very surprised that not all universities do that.
- aktau 10y ago
  Where was that, if I may ask?
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    In Portugal early 90's, FCT/UNL.

atombender 10y ago

The famous "each tool does just one thing well" mantra is also a depressingly overblown myth. Among the current Unix tools, there is a ridiculous amount of overlap. That's why we have both "ls" and "find", even though they do the same thing conceptually. "ps" has column output, but the way it formats, sorts, selects etc. columns is reinvented and not transferable to other tools such as "lsof" and "netstat", not to mention "top", which of course is just a self-updating "ps". Every tool invents filtering, sorting, formatting etc. in their own unique way. The various flags are not translatable to other tools. I've never used Powershell, but it seems to get one thing right that Unix never bothered to. Tools should emit data, or consume data, or display data, but tools should never do all three, because they will invariably reimplement something poorly that has been done elsewhere.

int_19h 10y ago
Powershell did one thing wrong, in that its tools emit objects, not data. In other words, they emit data with behavior (methods). This, in turn, imposes the CLR object and memory model on the whole thing, and makes the pipeline impossible to use between distinct processes. The right way to do this is to pick some reasonable text-based structured interchange format - s-exprs, JSON, whatever. Actually, it wouldn't be a bad thing to have a binary protocol as well, so long as all that complexity is negotiable, and is implemented by the standard library.
- lobster_johnson 10y ago
  Agreed. One huge benefit to a text format is that you can generate small "ad hoc" snippets (e.g. echo) easily. Otherwise I'd love something like Protocol Buffers here.
- EdiX 10y ago
  The problem here is that most unix tools (ls being the exception) do double duty, they both emit output for other programs and output for the user. Which one you get and how the user output is presented being controlled by flags. If you want them to only emit data in a standardized format you are implicitly cutting out the user. Since direct use by a human is arguably the main use case, output formatting needs to be reindtroduced somehow. You could make some adapter that you always pipe into that handles most formatting concerns but it's unlikely that it will be truly general. The only general way to do that is for the tool to output, along with the data, also some code that can be used to properly format the data. So there are only three ways to solve this: * Unix solution, with tools doing double duty and each tool having its own incompatible set of flags * Actual programming language solution, tools emit pure data. Great for programming, bad for interactive use. * Powershell solution, programs emit data+code: you are locked into some VM.