8 ms·

The Unix Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]

128 points by frik 13y ago

fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
Also this, not sure where the original link went. http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/login.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/login.html
- DonHopkins 13y ago
 In order to truly appreciate the rich dynamic interactive multimedia experience of this web page, you should view it in a modern browser fully supporting the standard <BLINK> tag, such as Netscape Navigator version 3.0 gold. http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/login.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/login.html That was the only legitimately justifiable use of the <BLINK> tag that I've ever made: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN"> <HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>UNIXUX: Click on the cursor.</TITLE> <META NAME="Author" CONTENT="Don Hopkins"> <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="User-Agent: Mozilla/3.0Gold (Macintosh; I; PPC)"> </HEAD> <BODY TEXT="#7CFE5A" BGCOLOR="#191919" LINK="#FF0000" VLINK="#FF3333" ALINK="#00FEFA"> <TT>UNIX HATERS Release 2.0 (unixux)</TT> <TT>login: <BLINK><A HREF="password.html">_</A></BLINK></TT> </BODY> </HTML> The worst use of the <BLINK> tag ever was the discussion held in the early days of RSS about escaping HTML in titles, whose attention-grabbing title went something like this: "Hey, what happens when you put a <BLINK> tag in the title???!!!" The content of that notorious discussion went on and off and on and off for weeks, giving all the netizens of the RSS community blogosphere terrible headaches, with people's entire blogs disappearing and reappearing every second, until it finally reached a flashing point, when Dave Winer humbly conceded that it wasn't the user's fault for being an idiot, and maybe just maybe there was tiny teeny little design flaw in RSS, and it wasn't actually such a great idea to allow HTML tags in RSS titles.
 - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
 Thank you so much for that. I was new to Unix/Linux (DEC Osf-1) when I first happened upon it. At the time it was much needed comic relief for me.
- frik 13y ago
 Thank you for using AT&T. (deep link: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/25.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/25.html ) ;)
jaryd 13y ago
The link to the PDF of the original book is broken on the site linked (washington.edu). I found it here: http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf
- dang 13y ago
  Thanks. We've changed the url to that from http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~weise/unix-haters.html http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~weise/unix-haters.html
- xmonkee 13y ago
  Thanks
frik 13y ago
The Anti-Foreword by Dennis Ritchie [1] is especially funny. One of the authors (Daniel Weise) wrote a post mortem ten years later. [2] Back in the heyday of /. there was a funny discussion going on. [3] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie [2] http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~weise/uhh-download.html http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~weise/uhh-download.html (link inside broken, book PDF is now linked from the HN title). [3] http://slashdot.org/story/03/04/26/2354245/unix-haters-handbook-available-online http://slashdot.org/story/03/04/26/2354245/unix-haters-handb...
DannyBee 13y ago
The mailing list was a lot funnier :) I wonder if anyone still has the real archives (there are partial, sanitized archives).
- frik 13y ago
  archive (sadly sanitized): http://www.mindspring.com/~blackhart/ http://www.mindspring.com/~blackhart/
  - DonHopkins 13y ago
    From: SS Date: Thu, 5 Mar 1992 15:29:31 -0500 Subject: The Story That Must Be Told OK. It's time to write The Book. You know what I'm talking about: The Unix Haters Handbook. Publishing is not a problem. If TLA Press won't touch it, my family owns a honest-to-god publishing company. Really. I'm willing to edit it, and anyone else is welcome to join in. The rules are identical to the rules for this mailing list. You can use technical jargon and not bother to explain it. Apologies or pragmatic suggestions (other than the canonical choice of avoiding unix or committing suicide) will not be tolerated. The chapters will be: 1) The Unix Epidemic The Abortion that Lived 2) The Shell Playing Russian Roulette With 6 Bullets In The Chamber 3) The File System Sure It Corrupts Your Files, But Look How Fast It Is! 4) Mail Don't Talk To Me, I'm Not A Typewriter 5) Security Oh, I'm Sorry Sir, Go Ahead, I Didn't Realize You Were Root 6) Programming Like Performing Rectal Surgery With a Rusty Spoon 7) Unix weenies It Can't Be a Bug, My Makefile Depends on It 8) The Future of Open Systems Terminal Cancer Patients Have Choices Too, You Know If you want to write any of these, or have a new topic to add, let me know. The first draft should be ready by July 1st, this summer, and we will go to press by November 1st. Oh yeah, we also need to get an artist who's good at drawing miserable people. There will be at least one illustration per chapter, preferably more. If you know someone, let me know. From: DW Date: Thu, 5 Mar 92 18:53:19 PST Subject: The Story That Must Be Told I've thought a lot about such a book. It should have an introduction by Dvorak and a forward by Pournelle. I have lots of other ideas, let's talk offline. From: TM Date: Thu, 05 Mar 92 19:18:07 -0800 Subject: Re: The Story That Must Be Told 9) UNIX Standards One standard is not enough From: DW Date: Fri, 6 Mar 92 15:50:02 PST Subject: Re: New Mailing List For The Unix Haters Handbook I had been planning to spend a month in the very near future solely working on some sort of unix-haters book. I've been collecting "best of" for a while now, with the creation of a book in mind. My goal is not money, I had been thinking on insisting that it appear in paperback for less than $10. I was going to get permission from everyone cited. My ideas for format differ from Silens's. It cannot be amateurishly done, nor be merely a book of rants. It should not contain words of the sort that get music records "warning: offensive lyrics" labels put on them. My goal was to produce something that would make a minor media splash, at least in the popular technical literature. If Cliff Stoll can get lots of press, so can this. Daniel
hf 13y ago
Being among the most zealous to worship at the altar of Kernighan and Ritchie, I, nevertheless, over the years, have come to appreciate the positions expressed in this fine, albeit often humdrum, collection. Concrete examples of the insanity of Unix might by now be largely obsolete (none of the csh- or symlink-related showcases work anymore), but the basic, deep annoyance of the Haters seems to me ever-valid: "Unix evolved; it was not designed". This holds true even in the age of the beautifully engineered surfaces of MacOS and Unity. Underneath, Unix lurks with all its idiosyncrasies and peculiarly half-hearted assumptions and informs all of the interfaces and paradigms above. No one who ever saw a Genera machine at work or appreciated fully the depth of Smalltalk's world view, will be able to dive into Unix and come back with the same deep sense of enlightenment. Unix' only redeeming, rather: defining, feature is this: relentless adaptability. Unix, as an ideology and an ever-changing set of tools, works precisely because it refuses to be held to any standard of aesthetics.
- chubot 13y ago
  That's true, but any system that reached Unix's scope would have to be evolved and not designed. It's a failure caused by its success. If SmallTalk or Genera grew popular enough to satisfy the needs of billions of people and hardware devices, then they would be infested with evolved cruft as well. Systems may feel more "coherent" or "designed" with tight coupling. I'm certain that such systems systems would not have made the jump from servers to desktops to mobile phones like Unix did. They would have been replaced with something more loosely coupled. The core principles of Unix are still there. It's just layered under a lot of cruft. It's true that much of it is caused by incomplete understanding. I've been hacking on Debian internals and this has become very clear to me. People say FreeBSD is more coherent... it's been tempting to me to switch. But it's more coherent because it does less (has less features than) Linux or OS X.
  - gtirloni 13y ago
    Any perceived design disadvantage gets overshadowed by the benefits derived from massive adoption. I think embedded developers might find VxWorks easier to work with but when they have to design something from scratch for it instead of just going with Linux which might already have everything ready (even if half-baked) ends up being the common choice. I think there are space for both (evolutionary and design-lead approaches). They just will be playing in different markets.
EGreg 13y ago
Isnt some of this still left in BSD (designed) vs Linux (evolved)?
microcolonel 13y ago
> As for me? I switched to the Mac. No more grep, no more piping, no more sed scripts. Just a simple, elegant life: “Your application has unexpectedly quit due to error number –1. OK?” BWAHAHA, Poor Don has to eat his shoe.
- eddieroger 13y ago
  I preferred this quote: > The Macintosh on which I type this has 64MB: Unix was not designed for the Mac. What kind of challenge is there when you have that much RAM? My Macintosh running UNIX-compliant OS X on a system with 8GB of RAM laughs at this statement, as I wrote code for my slightly less powerful Apple-made UNIX machine with 1GB of RAM that sits in my pocket.
  - microcolonel 13y ago
    I was born in 1997, so the only Mac I've ever owned(a 1GHz eMac) has never run anything that wasn't UNIX or UNIX-y. (I toy around with OpenBSD on it now)
    - eddieroger 13y ago
      Then you also haven't known the world of the Intel Macs. That really changed things since you could now build almost any *nix-based app on the box with very minimal modifications. I think this is one of the reasons they've become so popular with the developer community - UNIX underneath, Aqua to make the system friendly, ability to build almost any code you can compile and run Windows in desperate times thanks to Boot Camp.
  - ciupicri 13y ago
    By the way, does anyone know what kind of Macintosh had 64 MBs of RAM in 1994?
    - mti 13y ago
      Most of the midrange and high-end models at the time did support over 64 MB of RAM (the Centris 650/Quadra 800 supported 136 MB, the Quadra 950 supported 256 MB, etc.). In fact, even the 1987 Macintosh II could be pushed to 68 MB (or 128 MB with a ROM upgrade).
thegeomaster 13y ago
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! I think I've never seen such a marvelous way to say "eat shit". Dennis Ritchie sure was a fine gentleman.
deleted 13y ago
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smegel 13y ago
“Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. I don’t think that is a coincidence.” Classic.
- Karellen 13y ago
  My favourite: "Ken Thompson has an automobile which he helped design. Unlike most automobiles, it has neither speedometer, nor gas gauge, nor any of the other numerous idiot lights which plague the modern driver. Rather, if the driver makes a mistake, a giant “?” lights up in the center of the dashboard. “The experienced driver,” says Thompson, “will usually know what’s wrong.”"
  - gcb0 13y ago
    Which is true for most cases. Why do you think mechanics call it "idiot lights"? Because people see Sparks coming out of their breaks or drive on bald tires, or never change the oil or inspect coolant level and color... Until a idiot light tells them to think about the car. So yeah, most drivers would never even see most of those lights. And the check engine light which is the only one a driver with half a brain may still get... Is akin to a "?".
    - fzltrp 13y ago
      Compare that with clippy on Windows. It's a matter of perspective: some enjoy manual clutches, and others want fully automatic, both may be (in)convenient at times. Interestingly, MS has been trying to give more CLI power to their users, and Unices have been trying to close the gap in the opposit direction. Both approaches are useful.
      - SSLy 13y ago
        The word you are looking for is "convergence".
vibrolax 13y ago
Design cannot win, because there is always more talent wanting and willing to get stuff done.
ScottBurson 13y ago
As a shameless plug, permit me to direct your attention to the bottom of p. 211.
- mrmondo 13y ago
  Oh you devil!
deleted 13y ago
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deathanatos 13y ago
> Anyway, I have this Sparcstation ELC which I bought for my personal use in a moment of stupidity. It has a 760MB hard disk and 16MB of memory. I figured that 16MB ought to be enough, and indeed, pstat reports that on a typical day, running Ecch Windows, a few Emacses, xterms, and the occasional xload or xclock, I run 12 to 13MB of memory usage, tops. > But I didn’t come here today to talk about why 2 emacses and a window system should take five times the total memory of the late AIKS-10. No, today I came to talk about the virtual memory system. > Why is it that when I walk away from my trusty jerkstation for a while and come back, I touch the mouse and all of a sudden, whirr, rattle, rattle, whirr, all my processes get swapped back into memory? > I mean, why did they get paged out in the first place? It’s not like the system needed that memory—for chrissake, it still has 3 or 4 MB free! That's another quoted email in the Handbook, from a Robert E. Seastrom, dated 1993! I was wondering the same thoughts myself — fifteen years later — about Windows Vista, and it later became one of the wonderful things about switching to Linux, which does not page unless is must (though this behavior is configurable). (That said, when Linux runs out of memory, it can go on a Sisyphus-esque page-a-thon and die thrashing the disk about the interior of the machine casing. For all people complain about the OOM killer, sometimes, it's handy!)
DonHopkins 13y ago
UNIX-HATERS was originally another name for the ITS-LOVERS mailing list at the MIT-AI lab, which eventually spun off into its own mailing list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incompatible_Timesharing_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incompatible_Timesharing_Syste... In order to qualify for UNIX-HATERS, you had to send in a sufficiently vitriolic rant about Unix, or be recommended by a member notorious for their vitriolic rants about Unix: From: cent@mc.lcs.mit.edu Subject: i help maintain unix-haters Date: July 23, 1991 11:22:13 PM GMT+02:00 To: gumby@cygnus.com Cc: unix-haters-request@mc.lcs.mit.edu, don.hopkins@Eng.Sun.COM Date: Wed, 15 May 91 11:54:30 PDT From: Gumby Vinayak Wallace <gumby@cygnus.com> To: cent@ai.mit.edu Subject: do you maintain unix-haters? Don.Hopkins@Eng.Sun.COM should definately be on the list -- a much better ranter than many who DO send to it. done. i hope he enoys it. In 2007, I apologized to Jim Gettys for the tone of the X-Windows Disaster chapter I wrote for the book, to make sure he had no hard feelings and forgave me for my vitriolic rants and cheap shots of criticism: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/disaster.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/disast... DH>>>> Don Hopkins wrote: DH>>>> I've collected some of my favorite Motif code and comments (from Netscape, courtesy of Jamie Zawinski), on my "Motif Angst Page": http://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/unix-haters/x-windows/motif.html http://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/unix-haters/x-windows... DH>>>> Jamie put it this way: It's like trying to build a shelf of out mashed potatoes! JG>>>> Jim Gettys wrote: JG>>> Good analogy.... I didn't realize you were the author of the "The X-Windows Disaster". DH>> I hope you founds it more entertaining than offensive! JG> At the time, I remember it hurting; now I find it entertaining. Time cures such things. And Motif was definitely a vendor perpetrated unmitigated disaster: the worst of it was that it "succeeded" in unifying the UNIX gui, which means it succeeded at stopping all reasonable work on gui's on UNIX until the young Linux turks took over. JG> And by '93 or so, the UNIX vendors actively wanted no change, as they had given up on the desktop and any innovation would cost them money. DH>> The whole "Unix-Haters Handbook" thing was intended to shake up the status quo and inspire people to improve the situation instead of blindly accepting the received view. (And that's what's finally happened, although I can't take the credit, because it largely belongs to Linux -- and now that's the OLPC's mission!) DH>> The unix-haters mailing list was a spin-off of its-lovers@mit-ai: in order to qualify for the mailing list you had to post a truly vitriolic no-holds-barred eyeball-popping flame. DH>> I hope that helps to explain the tone of "The X-Windows Disaster", which I wrote to blow off steam while I was developing the X11 version of SimCity. JG> Yup. I won't hold it against you ;-). Though any operating system with ddt as its shell is downright user hostile... JG>>> The day I thought X was dead was the day I installed CDE on my Alpha. DH>> And then Linux came along and changed all the rules and assumptions! JG>>> It was years later I realized the young turks were ignoring the disaster perpetrated by the UNIX vendors in the name of "standardization"; since then, Keith Packard and I have tried to pay for our design mistakes in X by things like the new font model, X Render extension, Composite, and Cairo, while putting stakes in the heart of disasters like XIE, LBX, PEX, the old X core font model, and similar design by committee mistakes (though the broken core 2D graphics and font stuff must be considered "original sin" committed by people who didn't know any better at the time). DH>> Cairo looks wonderful! I'm looking forward to using it from Python, which should be lots of fun. JG> Yup. Cairo is really good stuff. This time we had the benefit of Lyle Ramshaw to get us unstuck. Would that I'd known Lyle in 1986; but it was too late 3 years later when I got to know him. DH>> A lot of that old X11 stuff was thrown in by big companies to shill existing products (like using PEX to sell 3d graphics hardware, by drawing rotating 3-d cubes in an attempt to hypnotize people). DH>> Remember UIL? I heard that was written by the VMS trolls at DEC, who naturally designed it with an 132 column line length limitation and no pre-processor of course. The word on the street was that DEC threw down the gauntlet and insisted on UIL being included in the standard, even though the rest of the committee hated it for sucking so bad. But DEC threatened to hold their breath until they got their way. DH>> And there were a lot of weird dynamics around commercial extensions like Display PostScript, which (as I remember it) was used as an excuse for not fixing the font problems a lot earlier: "If you want to do readable text, then you should be using Display PostScript." The problem was that Linux doesn't have a vendor to pay the Display PostScript licensing fee to Adobe, so Linux drove a lot of "urban renewal" of problems that had been sidelined by the big blundering companies originally involved with X. JG> Yup. Though I don't know the exact history there. JG> I was really burned out after X11, and had an undiagnosed medical problem. So I wasn't in the fight for sanity when most of that junk happened; and Bob Scheifler's personality is such that he didn't either, and was at that point still very focused on the base system. And SGI saw OpenGL as a competitive advantage, so PEX took a slow death. JG>>> So we've mostly succeeded at dragging the old whale off the beach and getting it to live again. DH>> Hey, that's a lot better than dynamiting the whale, which seemed like a such good idea at the time! (Oh the humanity!) DH>> <strikeout>http://www.perp.com/whale/</strikeout> http://www.perp.com/whale/</strikeout> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_whale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_whale DH>> -Don JG> Have you seen the whale video on the web? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtVSzU20ZGk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtVSzU20ZGk JG> One is amazed at how stupid some people can be. JG> Jim Gettys, One Laptop Per Child Here's some more modern footage of what it's like to work on X-Windows server internals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS4MN7sptLw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS4MN7sptLw

128 points by frik 13y ago

Also this, not sure where the original link went. http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/login.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/login.html

DonHopkins 13y ago
In order to truly appreciate the rich dynamic interactive multimedia experience of this web page, you should view it in a modern browser fully supporting the standard <BLINK> tag, such as Netscape Navigator version 3.0 gold. http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/login.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/login.html That was the only legitimately justifiable use of the <BLINK> tag that I've ever made: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN"> <HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>UNIXUX: Click on the cursor.</TITLE> <META NAME="Author" CONTENT="Don Hopkins"> <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="User-Agent: Mozilla/3.0Gold (Macintosh; I; PPC)"> </HEAD> <BODY TEXT="#7CFE5A" BGCOLOR="#191919" LINK="#FF0000" VLINK="#FF3333" ALINK="#00FEFA"> <TT>UNIX HATERS Release 2.0 (unixux)</TT> <TT>login: <BLINK><A HREF="password.html">_</A></BLINK></TT> </BODY> </HTML> The worst use of the <BLINK> tag ever was the discussion held in the early days of RSS about escaping HTML in titles, whose attention-grabbing title went something like this: "Hey, what happens when you put a <BLINK> tag in the title???!!!" The content of that notorious discussion went on and off and on and off for weeks, giving all the netizens of the RSS community blogosphere terrible headaches, with people's entire blogs disappearing and reappearing every second, until it finally reached a flashing point, when Dave Winer humbly conceded that it wasn't the user's fault for being an idiot, and maybe just maybe there was tiny teeny little design flaw in RSS, and it wasn't actually such a great idea to allow HTML tags in RSS titles.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
 Thank you so much for that. I was new to Unix/Linux (DEC Osf-1) when I first happened upon it. At the time it was much needed comic relief for me.
frik 13y ago
Thank you for using AT&T. (deep link: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/25.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/25.html ) ;)

jaryd 13y ago

The link to the PDF of the original book is broken on the site linked (washington.edu). I found it here: http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

dang 13y ago
Thanks. We've changed the url to that from http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~weise/unix-haters.html http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~weise/unix-haters.html
xmonkee 13y ago
Thanks

frik 13y ago

The Anti-Foreword by Dennis Ritchie [1] is especially funny. One of the authors (Daniel Weise) wrote a post mortem ten years later. [2] Back in the heyday of /. there was a funny discussion going on. [3] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie [2] http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~weise/uhh-download.html http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~weise/uhh-download.html (link inside broken, book PDF is now linked from the HN title). [3] http://slashdot.org/story/03/04/26/2354245/unix-haters-handbook-available-online http://slashdot.org/story/03/04/26/2354245/unix-haters-handb...

DannyBee 13y ago

The mailing list was a lot funnier :) I wonder if anyone still has the real archives (there are partial, sanitized archives).

frik 13y ago
archive (sadly sanitized): http://www.mindspring.com/~blackhart/ http://www.mindspring.com/~blackhart/
- DonHopkins 13y ago
  From: SS Date: Thu, 5 Mar 1992 15:29:31 -0500 Subject: The Story That Must Be Told OK. It's time to write The Book. You know what I'm talking about: The Unix Haters Handbook. Publishing is not a problem. If TLA Press won't touch it, my family owns a honest-to-god publishing company. Really. I'm willing to edit it, and anyone else is welcome to join in. The rules are identical to the rules for this mailing list. You can use technical jargon and not bother to explain it. Apologies or pragmatic suggestions (other than the canonical choice of avoiding unix or committing suicide) will not be tolerated. The chapters will be: 1) The Unix Epidemic The Abortion that Lived 2) The Shell Playing Russian Roulette With 6 Bullets In The Chamber 3) The File System Sure It Corrupts Your Files, But Look How Fast It Is! 4) Mail Don't Talk To Me, I'm Not A Typewriter 5) Security Oh, I'm Sorry Sir, Go Ahead, I Didn't Realize You Were Root 6) Programming Like Performing Rectal Surgery With a Rusty Spoon 7) Unix weenies It Can't Be a Bug, My Makefile Depends on It 8) The Future of Open Systems Terminal Cancer Patients Have Choices Too, You Know If you want to write any of these, or have a new topic to add, let me know. The first draft should be ready by July 1st, this summer, and we will go to press by November 1st. Oh yeah, we also need to get an artist who's good at drawing miserable people. There will be at least one illustration per chapter, preferably more. If you know someone, let me know. From: DW Date: Thu, 5 Mar 92 18:53:19 PST Subject: The Story That Must Be Told I've thought a lot about such a book. It should have an introduction by Dvorak and a forward by Pournelle. I have lots of other ideas, let's talk offline. From: TM Date: Thu, 05 Mar 92 19:18:07 -0800 Subject: Re: The Story That Must Be Told 9) UNIX Standards One standard is not enough From: DW Date: Fri, 6 Mar 92 15:50:02 PST Subject: Re: New Mailing List For The Unix Haters Handbook I had been planning to spend a month in the very near future solely working on some sort of unix-haters book. I've been collecting "best of" for a while now, with the creation of a book in mind. My goal is not money, I had been thinking on insisting that it appear in paperback for less than $10. I was going to get permission from everyone cited. My ideas for format differ from Silens's. It cannot be amateurishly done, nor be merely a book of rants. It should not contain words of the sort that get music records "warning: offensive lyrics" labels put on them. My goal was to produce something that would make a minor media splash, at least in the popular technical literature. If Cliff Stoll can get lots of press, so can this. Daniel

hf 13y ago

Being among the most zealous to worship at the altar of Kernighan and Ritchie, I, nevertheless, over the years, have come to appreciate the positions expressed in this fine, albeit often humdrum, collection. Concrete examples of the insanity of Unix might by now be largely obsolete (none of the csh- or symlink-related showcases work anymore), but the basic, deep annoyance of the Haters seems to me ever-valid: "Unix evolved; it was not designed". This holds true even in the age of the beautifully engineered surfaces of MacOS and Unity. Underneath, Unix lurks with all its idiosyncrasies and peculiarly half-hearted assumptions and informs all of the interfaces and paradigms above. No one who ever saw a Genera machine at work or appreciated fully the depth of Smalltalk's world view, will be able to dive into Unix and come back with the same deep sense of enlightenment. Unix' only redeeming, rather: defining, feature is this: relentless adaptability. Unix, as an ideology and an ever-changing set of tools, works precisely because it refuses to be held to any standard of aesthetics.

chubot 13y ago
That's true, but any system that reached Unix's scope would have to be evolved and not designed. It's a failure caused by its success. If SmallTalk or Genera grew popular enough to satisfy the needs of billions of people and hardware devices, then they would be infested with evolved cruft as well. Systems may feel more "coherent" or "designed" with tight coupling. I'm certain that such systems systems would not have made the jump from servers to desktops to mobile phones like Unix did. They would have been replaced with something more loosely coupled. The core principles of Unix are still there. It's just layered under a lot of cruft. It's true that much of it is caused by incomplete understanding. I've been hacking on Debian internals and this has become very clear to me. People say FreeBSD is more coherent... it's been tempting to me to switch. But it's more coherent because it does less (has less features than) Linux or OS X.
- gtirloni 13y ago
  Any perceived design disadvantage gets overshadowed by the benefits derived from massive adoption. I think embedded developers might find VxWorks easier to work with but when they have to design something from scratch for it instead of just going with Linux which might already have everything ready (even if half-baked) ends up being the common choice. I think there are space for both (evolutionary and design-lead approaches). They just will be playing in different markets.

EGreg 13y ago

Isnt some of this still left in BSD (designed) vs Linux (evolved)?

microcolonel 13y ago

> As for me? I switched to the Mac. No more grep, no more piping, no more sed scripts. Just a simple, elegant life: “Your application has unexpectedly quit due to error number –1. OK?” BWAHAHA, Poor Don has to eat his shoe.

eddieroger 13y ago
I preferred this quote: > The Macintosh on which I type this has 64MB: Unix was not designed for the Mac. What kind of challenge is there when you have that much RAM? My Macintosh running UNIX-compliant OS X on a system with 8GB of RAM laughs at this statement, as I wrote code for my slightly less powerful Apple-made UNIX machine with 1GB of RAM that sits in my pocket.
- microcolonel 13y ago
  I was born in 1997, so the only Mac I've ever owned(a 1GHz eMac) has never run anything that wasn't UNIX or UNIX-y. (I toy around with OpenBSD on it now)
  - eddieroger 13y ago
    Then you also haven't known the world of the Intel Macs. That really changed things since you could now build almost any *nix-based app on the box with very minimal modifications. I think this is one of the reasons they've become so popular with the developer community - UNIX underneath, Aqua to make the system friendly, ability to build almost any code you can compile and run Windows in desperate times thanks to Boot Camp.
- ciupicri 13y ago
  By the way, does anyone know what kind of Macintosh had 64 MBs of RAM in 1994?
  - mti 13y ago
    Most of the midrange and high-end models at the time did support over 64 MB of RAM (the Centris 650/Quadra 800 supported 136 MB, the Quadra 950 supported 256 MB, etc.). In fact, even the 1987 Macintosh II could be pushed to 68 MB (or 128 MB with a ROM upgrade).

thegeomaster 13y ago

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! I think I've never seen such a marvelous way to say "eat shit". Dennis Ritchie sure was a fine gentleman.

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smegel 13y ago

“Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. I don’t think that is a coincidence.” Classic.

Karellen 13y ago
My favourite: "Ken Thompson has an automobile which he helped design. Unlike most automobiles, it has neither speedometer, nor gas gauge, nor any of the other numerous idiot lights which plague the modern driver. Rather, if the driver makes a mistake, a giant “?” lights up in the center of the dashboard. “The experienced driver,” says Thompson, “will usually know what’s wrong.”"
- gcb0 13y ago
  Which is true for most cases. Why do you think mechanics call it "idiot lights"? Because people see Sparks coming out of their breaks or drive on bald tires, or never change the oil or inspect coolant level and color... Until a idiot light tells them to think about the car. So yeah, most drivers would never even see most of those lights. And the check engine light which is the only one a driver with half a brain may still get... Is akin to a "?".
  - fzltrp 13y ago
    Compare that with clippy on Windows. It's a matter of perspective: some enjoy manual clutches, and others want fully automatic, both may be (in)convenient at times. Interestingly, MS has been trying to give more CLI power to their users, and Unices have been trying to close the gap in the opposit direction. Both approaches are useful.
    - SSLy 13y ago
      The word you are looking for is "convergence".

vibrolax 13y ago

Design cannot win, because there is always more talent wanting and willing to get stuff done.

ScottBurson 13y ago

As a shameless plug, permit me to direct your attention to the bottom of p. 211.

mrmondo 13y ago
Oh you devil!

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deathanatos 13y ago

> Anyway, I have this Sparcstation ELC which I bought for my personal use in a moment of stupidity. It has a 760MB hard disk and 16MB of memory. I figured that 16MB ought to be enough, and indeed, pstat reports that on a typical day, running Ecch Windows, a few Emacses, xterms, and the occasional xload or xclock, I run 12 to 13MB of memory usage, tops. > But I didn’t come here today to talk about why 2 emacses and a window system should take five times the total memory of the late AIKS-10. No, today I came to talk about the virtual memory system. > Why is it that when I walk away from my trusty jerkstation for a while and come back, I touch the mouse and all of a sudden, whirr, rattle, rattle, whirr, all my processes get swapped back into memory? > I mean, why did they get paged out in the first place? It’s not like the system needed that memory—for chrissake, it still has 3 or 4 MB free! That's another quoted email in the Handbook, from a Robert E. Seastrom, dated 1993! I was wondering the same thoughts myself — fifteen years later — about Windows Vista, and it later became one of the wonderful things about switching to Linux, which does not page unless is must (though this behavior is configurable). (That said, when Linux runs out of memory, it can go on a Sisyphus-esque page-a-thon and die thrashing the disk about the interior of the machine casing. For all people complain about the OOM killer, sometimes, it's handy!)

DonHopkins 13y ago

UNIX-HATERS was originally another name for the ITS-LOVERS mailing list at the MIT-AI lab, which eventually spun off into its own mailing list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incompatible_Timesharing_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incompatible_Timesharing_Syste... In order to qualify for UNIX-HATERS, you had to send in a sufficiently vitriolic rant about Unix, or be recommended by a member notorious for their vitriolic rants about Unix: From: cent@mc.lcs.mit.edu Subject: i help maintain unix-haters Date: July 23, 1991 11:22:13 PM GMT+02:00 To: gumby@cygnus.com Cc: unix-haters-request@mc.lcs.mit.edu, don.hopkins@Eng.Sun.COM Date: Wed, 15 May 91 11:54:30 PDT From: Gumby Vinayak Wallace <gumby@cygnus.com> To: cent@ai.mit.edu Subject: do you maintain unix-haters? Don.Hopkins@Eng.Sun.COM should definately be on the list -- a much better ranter than many who DO send to it. done. i hope he enoys it. In 2007, I apologized to Jim Gettys for the tone of the X-Windows Disaster chapter I wrote for the book, to make sure he had no hard feelings and forgave me for my vitriolic rants and cheap shots of criticism: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/disaster.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/disast... DH>>>> Don Hopkins wrote: DH>>>> I've collected some of my favorite Motif code and comments (from Netscape, courtesy of Jamie Zawinski), on my "Motif Angst Page": http://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/unix-haters/x-windows/motif.html http://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/unix-haters/x-windows... DH>>>> Jamie put it this way: It's like trying to build a shelf of out mashed potatoes! JG>>>> Jim Gettys wrote: JG>>> Good analogy.... I didn't realize you were the author of the "The X-Windows Disaster". DH>> I hope you founds it more entertaining than offensive! JG> At the time, I remember it hurting; now I find it entertaining. Time cures such things. And Motif was definitely a vendor perpetrated unmitigated disaster: the worst of it was that it "succeeded" in unifying the UNIX gui, which means it succeeded at stopping all reasonable work on gui's on UNIX until the young Linux turks took over. JG> And by '93 or so, the UNIX vendors actively wanted no change, as they had given up on the desktop and any innovation would cost them money. DH>> The whole "Unix-Haters Handbook" thing was intended to shake up the status quo and inspire people to improve the situation instead of blindly accepting the received view. (And that's what's finally happened, although I can't take the credit, because it largely belongs to Linux -- and now that's the OLPC's mission!) DH>> The unix-haters mailing list was a spin-off of its-lovers@mit-ai: in order to qualify for the mailing list you had to post a truly vitriolic no-holds-barred eyeball-popping flame. DH>> I hope that helps to explain the tone of "The X-Windows Disaster", which I wrote to blow off steam while I was developing the X11 version of SimCity. JG> Yup. I won't hold it against you ;-). Though any operating system with ddt as its shell is downright user hostile... JG>>> The day I thought X was dead was the day I installed CDE on my Alpha. DH>> And then Linux came along and changed all the rules and assumptions! JG>>> It was years later I realized the young turks were ignoring the disaster perpetrated by the UNIX vendors in the name of "standardization"; since then, Keith Packard and I have tried to pay for our design mistakes in X by things like the new font model, X Render extension, Composite, and Cairo, while putting stakes in the heart of disasters like XIE, LBX, PEX, the old X core font model, and similar design by committee mistakes (though the broken core 2D graphics and font stuff must be considered "original sin" committed by people who didn't know any better at the time). DH>> Cairo looks wonderful! I'm looking forward to using it from Python, which should be lots of fun. JG> Yup. Cairo is really good stuff. This time we had the benefit of Lyle Ramshaw to get us unstuck. Would that I'd known Lyle in 1986; but it was too late 3 years later when I got to know him. DH>> A lot of that old X11 stuff was thrown in by big companies to shill existing products (like using PEX to sell 3d graphics hardware, by drawing rotating 3-d cubes in an attempt to hypnotize people). DH>> Remember UIL? I heard that was written by the VMS trolls at DEC, who naturally designed it with an 132 column line length limitation and no pre-processor of course. The word on the street was that DEC threw down the gauntlet and insisted on UIL being included in the standard, even though the rest of the committee hated it for sucking so bad. But DEC threatened to hold their breath until they got their way. DH>> And there were a lot of weird dynamics around commercial extensions like Display PostScript, which (as I remember it) was used as an excuse for not fixing the font problems a lot earlier: "If you want to do readable text, then you should be using Display PostScript." The problem was that Linux doesn't have a vendor to pay the Display PostScript licensing fee to Adobe, so Linux drove a lot of "urban renewal" of problems that had been sidelined by the big blundering companies originally involved with X. JG> Yup. Though I don't know the exact history there. JG> I was really burned out after X11, and had an undiagnosed medical problem. So I wasn't in the fight for sanity when most of that junk happened; and Bob Scheifler's personality is such that he didn't either, and was at that point still very focused on the base system. And SGI saw OpenGL as a competitive advantage, so PEX took a slow death. JG>>> So we've mostly succeeded at dragging the old whale off the beach and getting it to live again. DH>> Hey, that's a lot better than dynamiting the whale, which seemed like a such good idea at the time! (Oh the humanity!) DH>> <strikeout>http://www.perp.com/whale/</strikeout> http://www.perp.com/whale/</strikeout> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_whale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_whale DH>> -Don JG> Have you seen the whale video on the web? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtVSzU20ZGk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtVSzU20ZGk JG> One is amazed at how stupid some people can be. JG> Jim Gettys, One Laptop Per Child Here's some more modern footage of what it's like to work on X-Windows server internals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS4MN7sptLw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS4MN7sptLw