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Seriously, can you give me any example of their love of Unix. They strongly preferred Lisp machines. Please don't make up random "facts". It is irritating to f

by zohebv 16y ago

Seriously, can you give me any example of their love of Unix. They strongly preferred Lisp machines. Please don't make up random "facts". It is irritating to find false statements being upvoted just because noone bothers to double check them.

calibraxis 16y ago
Yes, the whole labor of hate argument was discussed in the foreword (written by Donald Norman): “Sure, we love your foreword,” they told me, but “The only truly irksome part is the ‘c’mon, you really love it.’ No. Really. We really do hate it. And don’t give me that ‘you deny it—y’see, that proves it’ stuff.” Norman remains suspicious, but the preface claims: "We have all experienced much more advanced, usable, and elegant systems than Unix ever was, or ever can be." Personally, I imagine for many of the participants, it was a labor of hate, not of love. We could chalk up any ambiguous love to Stockholm Syndrome.
- jff 16y ago
  Ritchie's anti-forward is the best: 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. ... 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.
tptacek 16y ago
I know multiple people who contributed to the book personally. I think you're missing part of the joke. But I concede, I don't know all or even most of them, so perhaps many of the Unix-haters secretly do pine for Mac OS 9.
- zohebv 16y ago
  First you claim, apparently the book was an act of love, which it clearly isn't. It is as scathing as the C++ FQA. The book has a dozen authors from respected institutions and you claim to know people who contributed to the book personally but the only apparent alternative OSes you think they could have used are Windows and OS 9. I don't have too much data right now, but it certainly looks like you are making "facts" up as you go along.
  - tptacek 16y ago
    I think it is very unlikely that I am making anything up as I go along to impress an anonymous stranger on Hacker News, but you can of course think whatever you'd like.

by zohebv 16y ago

calibraxis 16y ago

Yes, the whole labor of hate argument was discussed in the foreword (written by Donald Norman): “Sure, we love your foreword,” they told me, but “The only truly irksome part is the ‘c’mon, you really love it.’ No. Really. We really do hate it. And don’t give me that ‘you deny it—y’see, that proves it’ stuff.” Norman remains suspicious, but the preface claims: "We have all experienced much more advanced, usable, and elegant systems than Unix ever was, or ever can be." Personally, I imagine for many of the participants, it was a labor of hate, not of love. We could chalk up any ambiguous love to Stockholm Syndrome.

jff 16y ago
Ritchie's anti-forward is the best: 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. ... 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.

tptacek 16y ago

I know multiple people who contributed to the book personally. I think you're missing part of the joke. But I concede, I don't know all or even most of them, so perhaps many of the Unix-haters secretly do pine for Mac OS 9.

zohebv 16y ago
First you claim, apparently the book was an act of love, which it clearly isn't. It is as scathing as the C++ FQA. The book has a dozen authors from respected institutions and you claim to know people who contributed to the book personally but the only apparent alternative OSes you think they could have used are Windows and OS 9. I don't have too much data right now, but it certainly looks like you are making "facts" up as you go along.
- tptacek 16y ago
  I think it is very unlikely that I am making anything up as I go along to impress an anonymous stranger on Hacker News, but you can of course think whatever you'd like.