6 ms·

Anti-foreword to the Unix haters handbook by dmr

246 points by noufalibrahim 15y ago

aaronbrethorst 15y ago
I very fondly remember this caricature from the anti-forward: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/DennisRitchie.gif http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/DennisRitchie.gi...
bodyfour 15y 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 15y ago
Link for anyone looking for the Unix haters handbook: http://simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf http://simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf
- alttag 15y 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 15y 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 15y ago
    Yeow. That's a pretty harsh criticism. What alternatives were they in favor of?
    - seabee 15y ago
      It's PARC so likely a smalltalk environment is one of the alternatives.
pferde 15y ago
Indeed it was an amusing tongue-in-cheek point of view on unix.
comex 15y 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 15y 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.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - burgerbrain 15y 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.
  - anamax 15y 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.
moomin 15y 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.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- tankenmate 15y 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 15y 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."
jff 15y 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 15y ago
  Mine is: "C++ is to C as lung cancer is to lung".
ScottBurson 15y 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.

246 points by noufalibrahim 15y ago

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

bodyfour 15y 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 15y ago

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

alttag 15y 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 15y 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 15y ago
  Yeow. That's a pretty harsh criticism. What alternatives were they in favor of?
  - seabee 15y ago
    It's PARC so likely a smalltalk environment is one of the alternatives.

pferde 15y ago

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

comex 15y 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 15y 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.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- burgerbrain 15y 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.
- anamax 15y 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.

moomin 15y 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.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
tankenmate 15y 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 15y 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."

jff 15y 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 15y ago
Mine is: "C++ is to C as lung cancer is to lung".

ScottBurson 15y 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.