7 ms·

The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]

81 points by udev4096 3y ago

gnabgib 3y ago
(1994) First submitted 11 years ago[0], discussions in 2014[1](128 points, 50 comments), 2017[2](382 points, 308 comments), 2019[3](284 points, 158 comments), 2022[4](189 points. 86 comments), 4 months ago(141 points, 139 comments) and 28 days ago (52 points, 45 comments) [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5125613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5125613 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7726115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7726115 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13781815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13781815 [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19416485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19416485 [4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31417690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31417690
- wolverine876 3y ago
  Nobody on HN submitted the Unix Haters Handbook until 2013? I find that hard to believe.
  - jwilk 3y ago
    2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1272975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1272975 (28 comments)
    - wolverine876 3y ago
      I don't mean to send others on a scavanger hunt, but I'd expect it was posted within the first few months of HN (but don't have time to find it).
msla 3y ago
I can't get over the idea that this is a bunch of people who were angry their favorite proprietary systems got killed by open systems and, ultimately, open source. Compatibility and not being dependent on a single company are good things!
- gryn 3y ago
  It's not about objectivity it about teams/tribes if another team is winning then you're losing. Simple as that, you can see it in a lot of places. MMOs,console wars, phones, sports, politics, ...
- DannyBee 3y ago
  They weren't angry their systems got killed by open systems. They were angry that the replacements sucked.
  - msla 3y ago
    They were better in some ways and worse in others. ITS had PCLSRing and no concept of subdirectories, not to mention SIXLTR NAMING; Lisp machines were great as long as they didn't have to be fast or run continuously without GC; VMS was freaking VMS are you serious? The snide derision doesn't help, especially coming from people who were being snide on the behalf of for-profit companies that never gave a shit about them.
    - eschaton 3y ago
      And what, pray tell, was wrong with VMS? In my experience it works quite well.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- tivert 3y ago
  > I can't get over the idea that this is a bunch of people who were angry their favorite proprietary systems got killed by open systems and, ultimately, open source. Could the reason that idea is so hard to get over be because it's just wrong? I don't think these people "hated" UNIX because it was "open," I think they hated it because they thought it was bad.
  - msla 3y ago
    They didn't hate Unix because it was open, but their hatred of a more open system does make them look a bit ridiculous: Any system tied to a single company is doomed anyway, either to the company dying or the company discontinuing it and/or turning it into something you can't stomach. (Microsoft lives, but how happy are MS-DOS partisans these days?) It kinda taints their technical points with a whiff of fanboyism, a naïve partisanship and attachment to entities that didn't give a shit about them.
kelnos 3y ago
When I was much younger I used to find this funny and entertaining, but nowadays I just find it boring. It always seems fashionable to hate on things, and I'm just tired of the depressing, defeatist attitudes that support that fashion. I do wonder, though, if this were (re)written today, how much of it would be the same, how much of it would be outdated, and how much new stuff the haters would come up with. The chapter on file systems is mostly no longer relevant (some file systems do still suck, but the defaults are pretty solid now). NFS still sucks (IMO it sucks more than it used to), but far fewer people need to use it nowadays. C and C++ are still unfortunately prevalent, but there are at least quite a few systems programming alternatives, and they're gaining ground. Sendmail isn't the only game in town anymore, and I expect most outfits use something else these days, and USENET is a distant memory for most people, so there go another two chapters. But then the terminal/TTY situation has barely changed, and how all that works is just as (if not more) divorced from the reality of daily usage. Security has improved, but most people still have a god-mode root account, and most of the security improvements have come out of necessity; the world of networked computing is much more "dangerous" today than it was in the early 90s. Documentation is still often poor, and many systems still seem designed more for programmers than less-technical users. I wonder what they'd think of systemd and Wayland!
- lubutu 3y ago
  > NFS still sucks (IMO it sucks more than it used to) Any chance you could elaborate?
  - kelnos 3y ago
    Several of the criticisms the book lists are still true today. File locking is unreliable, deletions are weird, security is either garbage (in that you set it up in a way where there's very little security) or trash (in that you have to set up Kerberos infrastructure to make it work, and no one wants to have to do that). Perhaps I was a bit hyperbolic about it sucking more nowadays. At least you can use TCP with it and not UDP, and you can configure it so you can actually interrupt file operations when the server unexpectedly goes away and doesn't come back, instead of having to reboot your machine to clear things out. But most of what the book says is still the NFS status quo today, 30 years later.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
anthk 3y ago
Well: - ksh it's far better than sh, and I think Perl fixed the needs of a "medium" system scripting language. - Usenet it's still fun and a far better source than the web/stack overflow for some programming languages. Slrnpull it's a godsend. - Current X it's far better, but XPra/x2Go should have been part of X.org, with far better features over the network - GNU/Emacs it's the alternative from MIT/ITS/PDP-10 to Unix's 'worse it's better/KISS', but it's slower, error prone and easily deleted to much the .emacs file by itself with M-x customize -it deleted my (use-package) functions -. If Emacs' customize set the variables into the (use-package) funcs, it would be a great start. We need a "Emacs haters handbook" (and I like Emacs itself as a concept, but it needs polishing: (defun rant-start () " - GNUS it's dog slow on -current day- sized mail boxes (> 100MB) and it will last an hour on big mail lists/Usenet spools. Mbsync/slrnpull helps but as I said anywhere else Maildir support in GNU's it's broken and it will only show some directories, if any. Even if 'new', 'cur' and 'tmp' are already there. - RMail should had supported Maildir long ago. No, movemail it's not an option and the current mailboxes will choke on the Unix MBOX format. - Unfocussing the minibuffer prompt shouldn't cancel it. For Mastodon password prompts (or any other one), switching to a pane/window in Exwm (almost mandatory) will force you to repeat the login process on mastodon.el from the start. That's atrocious. - DIsplaying "big" images (relatively) it's slow, dog slow. IDK how pdf-tools does it (it works really fast and well), but doc-view it's a disaster and reading big CBZ files will crawl down Emacs. Inb4 'Emacs it's an editor, focus on the text' Emacs comes up with Calc with has plotting support with Gnuplot and OFC it needs a proper image displaying method. - Eww should support minimal CSS rules to parse at least simple pages as HN. - Stop locking on I/O, period. - The UI, even the Lucid/Athena port, it's not smooth at all even with some changes under some 'legacy' top-hier 32 bit machines, such as N270 netbooks. I'm missing something for sure. - Emacs notifications shouldn't be bound to dbus, the notifiication system should allow using messages and a beep/sound file as a method to alert the user, or a custom made script or Elisp code. " )
- sph 3y ago
  Apart from your minibuffer issue, everything else is the fault of third party packages. Even IO, as I am told you can do async IO in elisp but practically no package does it. So none of those issues are limitations of core.
flanked-evergl 3y ago
Quite often I have had to help someone on Windows, who prefers Windows to Linux, to use their Windows computers properly. I have never seen someone who prefers Windows to Linux help someone to use their Linux computers properly. Anecdotal, sure, but things be how they be.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
  It's to be expected as Linux is more niche on the desktop and so Linux people (like me) tend to be either enthusiasts or have some expertise with different systems. A similar example would be that you can see more pilots helping people fix their cars than you see a driver helping to fix a plane (despite there being more planes stuck on the ground than there are cars stuck in the sky).
  - flanked-evergl 3y ago
    To be clear, I'm talking about software engineers, which is where the analogy then breaks down because this it would be closer to Toyota engineers helping Ford engineers. I don't expect someone who is an accountant to know as much as a software engineer, but if a software engineer tells me they prefer Windows to Linux, but they can't use Windows, then I suspect their problem is not caused by any aspect of their operating system.
- adl 3y ago
  I prefer to use Windows as my daily driver. I also help people (friends, family, co-workers, etc.) with Linux (desktop or server) all the time. I have almost 30 years of experience using Linux. (using it since 1995)
gnufx 3y ago
I saved a requirement from an old MIT AI lab job on Usenet, perhaps from the early '90s: "Applicants must also have extensive knowledge of C and UNIX, although they should also have sufficiently good programming taste to not consider this an achievement."
arp242 3y ago
Dupe: The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38464715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38464715 - Nov 2023 (139 comments)
rawgabbit 3y ago
Is there a similar article that explains the origins of Linux and its design choices?

81 points by udev4096 3y ago

(1994) First submitted 11 years ago[0], discussions in 2014[1](128 points, 50 comments), 2017[2](382 points, 308 comments), 2019[3](284 points, 158 comments), 2022[4](189 points. 86 comments), 4 months ago(141 points, 139 comments) and 28 days ago (52 points, 45 comments) [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5125613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5125613 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7726115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7726115 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13781815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13781815 [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19416485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19416485 [4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31417690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31417690

wolverine876 3y ago
Nobody on HN submitted the Unix Haters Handbook until 2013? I find that hard to believe.
- jwilk 3y ago
  2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1272975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1272975 (28 comments)
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    I don't mean to send others on a scavanger hunt, but I'd expect it was posted within the first few months of HN (but don't have time to find it).

msla 3y ago

I can't get over the idea that this is a bunch of people who were angry their favorite proprietary systems got killed by open systems and, ultimately, open source. Compatibility and not being dependent on a single company are good things!

gryn 3y ago
It's not about objectivity it about teams/tribes if another team is winning then you're losing. Simple as that, you can see it in a lot of places. MMOs,console wars, phones, sports, politics, ...
DannyBee 3y ago
They weren't angry their systems got killed by open systems. They were angry that the replacements sucked.
- msla 3y ago
  They were better in some ways and worse in others. ITS had PCLSRing and no concept of subdirectories, not to mention SIXLTR NAMING; Lisp machines were great as long as they didn't have to be fast or run continuously without GC; VMS was freaking VMS are you serious? The snide derision doesn't help, especially coming from people who were being snide on the behalf of for-profit companies that never gave a shit about them.
  - eschaton 3y ago
    And what, pray tell, was wrong with VMS? In my experience it works quite well.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
tivert 3y ago
> I can't get over the idea that this is a bunch of people who were angry their favorite proprietary systems got killed by open systems and, ultimately, open source. Could the reason that idea is so hard to get over be because it's just wrong? I don't think these people "hated" UNIX because it was "open," I think they hated it because they thought it was bad.
- msla 3y ago
  They didn't hate Unix because it was open, but their hatred of a more open system does make them look a bit ridiculous: Any system tied to a single company is doomed anyway, either to the company dying or the company discontinuing it and/or turning it into something you can't stomach. (Microsoft lives, but how happy are MS-DOS partisans these days?) It kinda taints their technical points with a whiff of fanboyism, a naïve partisanship and attachment to entities that didn't give a shit about them.

kelnos 3y ago

When I was much younger I used to find this funny and entertaining, but nowadays I just find it boring. It always seems fashionable to hate on things, and I'm just tired of the depressing, defeatist attitudes that support that fashion. I do wonder, though, if this were (re)written today, how much of it would be the same, how much of it would be outdated, and how much new stuff the haters would come up with. The chapter on file systems is mostly no longer relevant (some file systems do still suck, but the defaults are pretty solid now). NFS still sucks (IMO it sucks more than it used to), but far fewer people need to use it nowadays. C and C++ are still unfortunately prevalent, but there are at least quite a few systems programming alternatives, and they're gaining ground. Sendmail isn't the only game in town anymore, and I expect most outfits use something else these days, and USENET is a distant memory for most people, so there go another two chapters. But then the terminal/TTY situation has barely changed, and how all that works is just as (if not more) divorced from the reality of daily usage. Security has improved, but most people still have a god-mode root account, and most of the security improvements have come out of necessity; the world of networked computing is much more "dangerous" today than it was in the early 90s. Documentation is still often poor, and many systems still seem designed more for programmers than less-technical users. I wonder what they'd think of systemd and Wayland!

lubutu 3y ago
> NFS still sucks (IMO it sucks more than it used to) Any chance you could elaborate?
- kelnos 3y ago
  Several of the criticisms the book lists are still true today. File locking is unreliable, deletions are weird, security is either garbage (in that you set it up in a way where there's very little security) or trash (in that you have to set up Kerberos infrastructure to make it work, and no one wants to have to do that). Perhaps I was a bit hyperbolic about it sucking more nowadays. At least you can use TCP with it and not UDP, and you can configure it so you can actually interrupt file operations when the server unexpectedly goes away and doesn't come back, instead of having to reboot your machine to clear things out. But most of what the book says is still the NFS status quo today, 30 years later.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

anthk 3y ago

Well: - ksh it's far better than sh, and I think Perl fixed the needs of a "medium" system scripting language. - Usenet it's still fun and a far better source than the web/stack overflow for some programming languages. Slrnpull it's a godsend. - Current X it's far better, but XPra/x2Go should have been part of X.org, with far better features over the network - GNU/Emacs it's the alternative from MIT/ITS/PDP-10 to Unix's 'worse it's better/KISS', but it's slower, error prone and easily deleted to much the .emacs file by itself with M-x customize -it deleted my (use-package) functions -. If Emacs' customize set the variables into the (use-package) funcs, it would be a great start. We need a "Emacs haters handbook" (and I like Emacs itself as a concept, but it needs polishing: (defun rant-start () " - GNUS it's dog slow on -current day- sized mail boxes (> 100MB) and it will last an hour on big mail lists/Usenet spools. Mbsync/slrnpull helps but as I said anywhere else Maildir support in GNU's it's broken and it will only show some directories, if any. Even if 'new', 'cur' and 'tmp' are already there. - RMail should had supported Maildir long ago. No, movemail it's not an option and the current mailboxes will choke on the Unix MBOX format. - Unfocussing the minibuffer prompt shouldn't cancel it. For Mastodon password prompts (or any other one), switching to a pane/window in Exwm (almost mandatory) will force you to repeat the login process on mastodon.el from the start. That's atrocious. - DIsplaying "big" images (relatively) it's slow, dog slow. IDK how pdf-tools does it (it works really fast and well), but doc-view it's a disaster and reading big CBZ files will crawl down Emacs. Inb4 'Emacs it's an editor, focus on the text' Emacs comes up with Calc with has plotting support with Gnuplot and OFC it needs a proper image displaying method. - Eww should support minimal CSS rules to parse at least simple pages as HN. - Stop locking on I/O, period. - The UI, even the Lucid/Athena port, it's not smooth at all even with some changes under some 'legacy' top-hier 32 bit machines, such as N270 netbooks. I'm missing something for sure. - Emacs notifications shouldn't be bound to dbus, the notifiication system should allow using messages and a beep/sound file as a method to alert the user, or a custom made script or Elisp code. " )

sph 3y ago
Apart from your minibuffer issue, everything else is the fault of third party packages. Even IO, as I am told you can do async IO in elisp but practically no package does it. So none of those issues are limitations of core.

flanked-evergl 3y ago

Quite often I have had to help someone on Windows, who prefers Windows to Linux, to use their Windows computers properly. I have never seen someone who prefers Windows to Linux help someone to use their Linux computers properly. Anecdotal, sure, but things be how they be.

ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
It's to be expected as Linux is more niche on the desktop and so Linux people (like me) tend to be either enthusiasts or have some expertise with different systems. A similar example would be that you can see more pilots helping people fix their cars than you see a driver helping to fix a plane (despite there being more planes stuck on the ground than there are cars stuck in the sky).
- flanked-evergl 3y ago
  To be clear, I'm talking about software engineers, which is where the analogy then breaks down because this it would be closer to Toyota engineers helping Ford engineers. I don't expect someone who is an accountant to know as much as a software engineer, but if a software engineer tells me they prefer Windows to Linux, but they can't use Windows, then I suspect their problem is not caused by any aspect of their operating system.
adl 3y ago
I prefer to use Windows as my daily driver. I also help people (friends, family, co-workers, etc.) with Linux (desktop or server) all the time. I have almost 30 years of experience using Linux. (using it since 1995)

gnufx 3y ago

I saved a requirement from an old MIT AI lab job on Usenet, perhaps from the early '90s: "Applicants must also have extensive knowledge of C and UNIX, although they should also have sufficiently good programming taste to not consider this an achievement."

arp242 3y ago

Dupe: The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38464715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38464715 - Nov 2023 (139 comments)

rawgabbit 3y ago

Is there a similar article that explains the origins of Linux and its design choices?