[HN Gopher] The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]
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The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]
Author : bobsmith432
Score : 94 points
Date : 2023-11-29 20:20 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (web.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (web.mit.edu)
| bioneuralnet wrote:
| Always a good read, but it needs an update with modern cultural
| references. Even I, nearly middle aged, have very little idea
| what it means to compare X.org to Iran-Contra and Regan's
| spending habits.
| tyingq wrote:
| Well, and maybe some talk about Wayland.
| civilitty wrote:
| What's the right modern analogy for that transition?
|
| Fukushima?
| tyingq wrote:
| The F-35 fighter jet program maybe.
| ikidd wrote:
| Ugh. I do...
| sillywalk wrote:
| Just for you - SNL Reagan the "Mastermind"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5wfPlgKFh8
| postmodest wrote:
| I still have the barf-bag.
|
| Also jwz is still a salty old man.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| The first time I leraned about this book I giggled about the
| title. But in the modern world of the conformity and a learned
| helplessness it's a quiet reminder what you can't do better if
| nobody says you unpleasant things.
| estebank wrote:
| > But in the modern world of the conformity and a learned
| helplessness it's a quiet reminder what you can't do better if
| nobody says you unpleasant things.
|
| I fight a lot against learned helplessness, trying to get
| people to actually report bugs, to complain about papercuts
| they encounter in tools that I can change. But because people
| are used to having their complaints fall on deaf ears, they
| don't, so I seek them out in places like here and some time
| back, Twitter. But that also brings up a dredge of non-
| constructive unactionable complaints that end up doing nothing
| more than make me shake my head and close the tab. There are
| ways of complaining without being nasty to the people doing the
| work. Being a dick is not a personality type.
| zokier wrote:
| > But in the modern world of the conformity and a learned
| helplessness it's a quiet reminder what you can't do better if
| nobody says you unpleasant things.
|
| But UNIX continues to dominate and have problems, so I don't
| see Unix-Haters Handbook being very good example of saying
| unpleasant things making anything better; its more of a
| counter-example, demonstrating how annoying rants get easily
| ignored
| spit2wind wrote:
| It turns out passivity to shock is the default. _Learned_
| helplessness doesn 't exist. It's less about saying unpleasant
| things and more about assisting others towards control. Of
| course, less is more, right :)
|
| https://ppc.sas.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/learnedhelples...
| tedunangst wrote:
| Nothing about unix got better as a response to this book.
| tyingq wrote:
| The printed one included a "Unix Barf Bag" glued to the back
| cover.
|
| https://imgur.com/a/0fGOdP7
| dcminter wrote:
| I'd forgotten that! It was a nice touch.
| dcminter wrote:
| I remember borrowing this from a friend a couple of years after
| that Finnish chap created a *nix that I could run on my lowly 386
| machine.
|
| If you are a unix lover (as I am), then it's worth it at the very
| least for the anti-foreword by Dennis Ritchie.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Ritchie tip-toed right up to the line between staying tongue-
| in-cheek and ripping them to shreds. It was quite impressive
| IMO.
| kagevf wrote:
| Felt like the hate was mutual.
| cf100clunk wrote:
| This item has a fairly even periodicity of previous submissions
| here at HN. I'm not quibbling about resubmissions, just wondering
| what is the motivation re: this particular piece? EDIT: Replies
| and not downvotes would be appreciated.
| dcminter wrote:
| Does it need one? There's a longish list of perennials. Mostly
| what they have in common is that they're interesting to first-
| timers and pithy enough to be worth a re-read for the rest of
| us. Someone comes across it for the first time, or are reminded
| of it, and bob's your uncle it pops up again as a submission.
| dang wrote:
| Yup that's right - reposts are fine after a year or so
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), and it's good
| for newer cohorts of users to get access to the perennials:
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.
| ..
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| Possibly because of this mention in the comments of a recent El
| Reg article about Wayland:
|
| https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2023/11/29/rhel_10_...
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| It's like the frequently questioned answers of C++: always a
| good read. https://yosefk.com/c++fqa/
| rdhatt wrote:
| A lot of people here put Unix on a pedestal, so finding a
| published book that so explicitly hates Unix is quite novel.
| Furthermore, the criticism doesn't come from the typical
| demographic, Microsoft Windows users.
| j2kun wrote:
| To what extent have the problems in the book been addressed since
| 1994?
| cf100clunk wrote:
| Could you be more specific?
| justin66 wrote:
| To what extent have the problems in _The Unix-Haters
| Handbook_ been addressed since 1994?
| bee_rider wrote:
| Maybe they wanted to know which month you were taking
| about.
| tyingq wrote:
| The "plethora of incomplete, incompatible shells" has narrowed
| down a fair amount if you only include ones in wide use.
|
| And "The push for a unified Unix" sort of happened, we're down
| to 2 or 3 that get any broad attention.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| 2 or 3? Linux, and what are the other 1 or 2?
| tyingq wrote:
| MacOS, and various might argue Minix (prevalence via Intel
| Management Engine), or FreeBSD, etc.
| mongol wrote:
| OSX I guess qualifies
| ikidd wrote:
| Well, if we're talking about the problem of it still existing,
| that one has almost been solved.
| GeorgeTirebiter wrote:
| I was thinking the same thing; so many of their original
| complaints have been addressed.
|
| However, one has not: unix _still_ uses the NJ-style (vs the
| MIT style), which is, if you can 't figure out how to handle an
| error -- then don't. Also, put the burden on the programmer.
| Lovely stuff like that, which is core to the "unix philosophy".
| mwcremer wrote:
| To be fair, the web as a whole is like that these days, in
| that HTTP explicitly includes the _user_ as part of the error
| handling (404, 500, 503). How many times have you hit
| "Reload" today?
| fanf2 wrote:
| That was much less true by the end of the 1990s. Partly due
| to things like BSD's improved signal handling. And partly due
| to the userland code quality improvements from the BSD and
| GNU rewrites.
|
| Shell scripting is still a nightmare for error handling, but
| by the end of the 1990s there were better scripting languages
| available to use when that matters.
| bee_rider wrote:
| There are no longer good operating systems to compare Unix-
| clones against, so those of us who've grown up in this
| millennium don't even see the problems.
| tech_ken wrote:
| X11 continues to be A Thing, although the transition to Wayland
| is somewhat underway
| tedunangst wrote:
| > Even if you can get an X program to compile, there's no
| guarantee it'll work with your server. If an application
| requires an X extension that your server doesn't provide,
| then it fails.
|
| Thankfully Wayland fixed this by locking down the protocol
| and banning extensions.
| arp242 wrote:
| Pretty much all of them, insofar they were even valid concerns
| to begin with because many are not, or are at least hugely
| simplified, and a number of others have nothing to do with
| "Unix" in the first place.
|
| The entire book is basically "let's compare the worst of 10
| Unix systems to the best of 10 other systems, and then come to
| the conclusion all of Unix sucks and all the others are
| brilliant". Well, anything "sucks" in that way. And that is
| assuming that "best of 10 other systems" is accurate and not
| hugely biased and viewed with rose-coloured glasses.
|
| I think this sentence probably sums up the book quite nicely:
|
| > Will journaling become prevalent in the Unix world at large?
| Probably not. After all, it's non-standard.
|
| Which probably tells you all you need to know about the
| mentality of the authors. Nothing in any standard prevented
| anyone from journaling. It's just FUD.
|
| The first journaling filesystem was introduced in 1990, in AIX,
| and then in 1991 in HP-UX. Both are Unix. Windows followed in
| 1993, Apple in 1998. This book is from 1994. This was more or
| less cutting-edge(-ish) stuff back then.
|
| "Storing files" reliably has always been hard, on any system.
| "Unix can lose files" - well, yeah, just like any other system
| mate. Unix lead the way on improving that with journaling, and
| the book even acknowledges that in the paragraph before the one
| I quoted, and it's still whinging and whining and spreading
| bullshit FUD.
|
| I'm not saying Unix is perfect today and I'm sure as hell not
| saying Unix anno 1994 was perfect. but a careful thoughtful
| criticism this book is not. The best part is Dennis Ritchie's
| "anti-foreword".
|
| A book refuting all the bullshit in this book, even from a 1994
| perspective, would probably be longer than this book. It's a
| classic case of bullshit asymmetry where flinging some nonsense
| in to the world takes almost no effort at all, but refuting it
| takes a lot more effort.
| postmodest wrote:
| Unix has gotten better while everything else got worse.
|
| We no longer have dinosaurs like LISP-M or TOPS-10 for the
| Unix-haters to get rose-colored nostalgia for.
|
| And Windows NT proved how terrible the alternative could be.
| The NT api and Powershell is basically the "Monkey's-Paw"
| version of what the authors wanted. Be careful what you wish
| for.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| It's so strange that as far back as the 80s a lot of the
| criticism of unix is that it wasn't "graphical". Meanwhile in the
| year 2023 AD I've moved more and more of my workflow to the
| terminal to escape the rapidly changing, distracting, and
| visually bloated GUI landscape.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| If it is in the terminal (command line to be specific since GUI
| is possible inside a terminal too) then it is already ready for
| automation, containerisation, running on a server.
| pjmlp wrote:
| As someone that was alive during those UNIX days, I really
| don't get the appeal to live in the past.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| I just gave you multiple reasons.
| ploum wrote:
| I don't believe it is "the past" which is appealing.
|
| We live in a very graphical society, with (moving) pictures
| everywhere, all the time. But to "think", you need words. As
| Neal Stephenson put it in "In the beginning was the command
| line", Words are the only technology available to encode
| thoughts. While images and sounds convey more emotions. It's
| not a coincidence that we are here exchanging words.
|
| Command-line, is a way to exchange words with a computer. It
| is way more precise, more efficient. But it takes learning
| and thinking. It's harder the same way it is harder to read a
| book than to watch a movie. Especially if you never learned
| to read in the first place which, for the command-line, is
| approximately everyone but a few geeks.
|
| If your goal is to "think" precisely and convey this thinking
| into something tangible on a computer, then you probably want
| the command line. But, as it needs a lot of learning, you
| don't want it for temporary job. You don't learn to read
| because you want to read Harry Potter. You learn to read
| because you want to spend your life reading books.
|
| In "UNIX As Litterature", Scoville argued that UNIX is done
| by literary people for literary people. People which have a
| strong "book" culture. People who probably enjoy books more
| than the movies because "there's a lot more, it's more
| subtle, I can imagine it like I want".
|
| Those people, (disclaimer: I count myself in those) may even
| have too much "graphics" in their daily lives. Too many
| pictures. Billboards, movies, ads, colored and graphical
| t-shirts everywhere, branding.
|
| Retreating to the command-line feels good, calm, zen. (see
| Stephenson book again).
|
| But, I admit, those people are a minority. Graphical
| interfaces have the advantage of being intuitive. Intuitive
| literally means "you don't need to think" (that's what
| intuition is). You click randomly and, by trial and error,
| you learn some arbitrary rules that the designers decided to
| use. (when I was teaching basic Windows XP computer use to
| elders, I once got a very simple question: "how do I know if
| I need to click once or double click?". I never could answer
| that. There are no real rule. You learn it and never think
| about it afterward).
|
| So the GUI is really about removing the thinking from the
| process. Which is good when you don't care about the process
| or when you are not really sure what you want. Or when you
| want something to be quickly done once and for all.
|
| Command-line forces you to clarify your thoughts all the
| time. It is hard. It is energy consuming. But this forces you
| to take real decisions.
| arp242 wrote:
| Unix was graphical. It even had a graphical control panel long
| before Windows in /usr/bin/vi.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| I haven't worked in a GUI in 5 years
| bradford wrote:
| As someone who picked up C++ in the late 90s, the discussion on
| the language resonates with me:
|
| "Other books can tell you how using any of dozens of object-
| oriented languages can make programmers more productive, make
| code more robust, and reduce maintenance costs. Don't expect to
| see any of these advantages in C++..."
|
| "That's because C++ misses the point of what being object-
| oriented was all about. Instead of simplifying things, C++ sets a
| new world record for complexity. Like Unix, C++ was never
| designed, it mutated as one goofy mistake after another became
| obvious. It's just one big mess of afterthoughts. There is no
| grammar specifying the language (something practically all other
| languages have), so you can't even tell when a given line of code
| is legitimate or not."
| pjmlp wrote:
| C++ was born into UNIX, on the same corridor as UNIX and C
| folks were, hence why its adoption grew alongside UNIX and C.
|
| I suggest reading Design and Evolution of C++.
| mianos wrote:
| I use C++ and Python every day. There are ways to make C++
| pretty tidy but it is always some tidy stuff in a few files
| with the rest being a working, but, steaming pile of crap. I
| always laugh when people seem to jump on a code base and use a
| few new features.
|
| That said, if, say my 15 year old crappy car has a hand built
| twin turbo, hand built multiple times, v8, that revs to 8500
| with a custom built diff and suspension. Given a choice of one
| of those fancy new, clean lined, reliable cars and mine, I know
| which one I would take to out if I wanted to have fun and go
| fast.
|
| Now relate this to go, rust and C++.
| idkdotcom wrote:
| Say what you will, but I started my professional career with
| computers back in 1998 doing professional services for HP and its
| variant of UNIX, HP-UX, and I haven't looked back. As I kid I had
| played around with a number of personal computers that ran either
| MS-DOS, Windows or proprietary OS'es (such as the AmigaDOS).
|
| To this day, I consider UNIX-Like systems to be a delight. Even
| Apple had to move to UNIX.
|
| Big Tech would not exist without Linux (aka UNIX).
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31417690 - May 2022 (86
| comments)
|
| _The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19416485 - March 2019 (157
| comments)
|
| _The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17614992 - July 2018 (1
| comment)
|
| _The Unix-HATERS Handbook [pdf]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15403642 - Oct 2017 (2
| comments)
|
| _The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13781815 - March 2017 (307
| comments)
|
| _The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9976694 - July 2015 (5
| comments)
|
| _The Unix Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7726115 - May 2014 (50
| comments)
|
| _Anti-foreword to the Unix haters handbook by dmr_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3106271 - Oct 2011 (31
| comments)
|
| _The Unix Haters Handbook_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1272975 - April 2010 (28
| comments)
|
| _The Unix Hater's Handbook, Reconsidered_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=319773 - Sept 2008 (5
| comments)
| anotheraccount9 wrote:
| I can't wait for an AI/OS to simply ask it what I need to do.
| Merrill wrote:
| Fairly early, Bell Labs executives decided to mandate that Bell
| Labs organizations developing software for the Bell System use
| Unix, which was from the research organization.
|
| This led to many inventive rationales as to why a non-DEC
| computer and a non-Unix OS where really essential for specific
| applications. Resistance lasted for some time, but was eventually
| futile.
| wbadart wrote:
| I knew of Don Norman from reading The Design of Everyday Things a
| few years ago; funny to see his name pop up here!
|
| Searching around to make sure it's the same Norman, I came to
| find out that he wrote an article, _The truth about Unix: The
| user interface is horrid_ , 7 years before DoET came out (which
| is confirmed in the Forward)! Had no idea he was on this scene.
| eigenhombre wrote:
| The "Illustrations" credit on the cover is covered up by the
| "Programmers Press" but it looks like it is John Klossner. The
| hand-drawn illustrations are great, definitely one of my favorite
| aspects of the book.
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