by imran3740 on 3/17/19, 8:46 PM with 157 comments
by mtraven on 3/18/19, 1:42 AM
And still miss my Lisp Machine. It's not that Unix is really that bad, it's that it has a certain model of computer use which has crowded out the more ambitious visions which were still alive in the 70s and 80s.
Much as the web (the Unix of hypertext) crowded out the more ambitious visions of what computational media for intellectual work could be (see the work of Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson). That's a bigger tragedy IMO. Unix, eh, it's good enough, but the shittiness of the web makes humanity stupider than we should be, at a time when we can ill afford it.
by uniqueid on 3/17/19, 11:38 PM
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 pieby jayalpha on 3/18/19, 8:23 AM
To the contributers to this book:
I have succumbed to the temptation you offered in your preface: I do write you off as envious malcontents and romantic keepers of memo- ries. The systems you remember so fondly (TOPS-20, ITS, Multics, Lisp Machine, Cedar/Mesa, the Dorado) are not just out to pasture, they are fertilizing it from below. Your judgments are not keen, they are intoxicated by metaphor. In the Preface you suffer first from heat, lice, and malnourishment, then become prisoners in a Gulag. In Chapter 1 you are in turn infected by a virus, racked by drug addiction, and addled by puffiness of the genome.
Yet your prison without coherent design continues to imprison you. How can this be, if it has no strong places? The rational prisoner exploits the weak places, creates order from chaos: instead, collec- tives like the FSF vindicate their jailers by building cells almost com- patible with the existing ones, albeit with more features. The journalist with three undergraduate degrees from MIT, the researcher at Microsoft, and the senior scientist at Apple might volunteer a few words about the regulations of the prisons to which they have been transferred. Your sense of the possible is in no sense pure: sometimes you want the same thing you have, but wish you had done it yourselves; other times you want something different, but can't seem to get people to use it; 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. You claim to seek progress, but you succeed mainly in whining. Here is my metaphor: your book is a pudding stuffed with apposite observations, many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain life for some. But it is not a tasty pie: it reeks too much of contempt and of envy.
Bon appetit!
by darkpuma on 3/17/19, 9:53 PM
However I think it still has a valuable lesson that many, particularly young CS students, would benefit from: Unix is not the perfect fundamental model for computing. C is not the gospel. Their prevalence today is as much a historic and economic accident as a rational consequence of their objective merits. Both are social artifacts, not manifestations of fundamental truths.
Worshipers of Bell Labs (such as the cat-v or suckless folks) don't get this, and I've seen them pull a lot of people down that rabbit hole with them, particularly young and inexperienced students.
by yebyen on 3/17/19, 9:46 PM
It's a cynical UNIX manual from the 1990's. Here:
> 14 NFS..............283
> Nightmare File System
> Not Fully Serviceable............284
> No File Security...........287
> Not File System Specific? (Not Quite)..........292
Here also:
> The Oxymoronic World of Unix Security .......243
> Holes in the Armor ........244
> The Worms Crawl In ..........257
I work in IT systems development in a University IT department. I want to read this take on UNIX from 1994, just to see how much better things haven't gotten.
OK, the state of the art has gotten better, but if I compare my work environment which is byzantine complexity and full of bespoke garbage sometimes, to the hells apparently described herein, I bet I can find more similarities than differences.
And that will hopefully make me a more effective communicator about how to make things better with modern convenience technologies that we're not using enough. (Dare I say Kubernetes is the one big thing that is actually majorly different today, compared to UNIX in the 1990's.)
by _kst_ on 3/18/19, 4:44 AM
"We wrote the contract with our publisher to have the copyright revert to us once the book went out of print. So yes, we have the right to publish it online. Feel free to mirror it where ever you want, print it out, and bind it."
by Smithalicious on 3/18/19, 7:32 AM
I think it's a good book and worth reading still, if not especially, in the modern world where to many people Unix and its family are the hot "alternative" that is often favourably compared against Windows and its ilk.
But I also think that Ritchie's "anti-preface" was already quite on-the-nose when the book came out and has only become more true over time.
by alwillis on 3/17/19, 10:28 PM
But how things change. This was before macOS became BSD-based and before I really got into web development because today, I spend so much time at a shell prompt inside of the Terminal app. I certainly appreciate the elegance of Unix a lot more today.
by vermilingua on 3/18/19, 7:32 AM
by mcguire on 3/18/19, 3:05 PM
"We have tried to avoid paragraph-length footnotes in this book, but X has defeated us by switching the meaning of client and server. In all other client/server relationships, the server is the remote machine that runs the application (i.e., the server provides services, such a database service or computation service). For some perverse reason that’s better left to the imagination, X insists on calling the program running on the remote machine “the client.” This program displays its windows on the “window server.” We’re going to follow X terminology when discussing graphical client/servers. So when you see “client” think “the remote machine where the application is running,” and when you see “server” think “the local machine that dis- plays output and accepts user input.”
Sigh.
by etaioinshrdlu on 3/17/19, 11:21 PM
by GnarfGnarf on 3/17/19, 9:36 PM
Highly recommended.
by Naac on 3/17/19, 10:09 PM
I found the commentary and history both hilarious and informative. The anti-forward by Dennis Ritchie is also very funny.
If anyone has found similar CS style humor books, please let me know!
by gerbilly on 3/18/19, 2:04 AM
It came with a vomit bag.
by rcarmo on 3/18/19, 7:48 AM
by waynecochran on 3/17/19, 11:26 PM
by iheartpotatoes on 3/18/19, 2:07 AM
by phil9987 on 3/18/19, 7:54 AM
by wazoox on 3/18/19, 12:28 PM
Try unixux. Really.
by vagab0nd on 3/18/19, 9:05 PM
And what's funny is, some of the things it criticizes are features I'd not heard of and actually learned from the book itself. E.g. bare double dash.
by moomin on 3/18/19, 12:05 PM
by pts_ on 3/18/19, 1:32 AM
by nickpsecurity on 3/18/19, 2:56 PM
by dboreham on 3/17/19, 10:54 PM
by fromthestart on 3/18/19, 9:04 AM
But in geoscience grad school just five or so years ago, a number of older, but technically minded professors were still using Sun machines, and most of the manuals for geoscientific software tend to provide supplementary information for other modern exotic systems/OSes, so I wonder: has windows replaced Unix as the technically inferior/evolutionary superior champion?
by systemBuilder on 3/18/19, 12:01 AM
I know because I attended that school and worked with the fathers of Multics. The sad fact is that MIT produces extreme bloatware that nobody understands nor needs (gnu emacs cough cough). MIT has almost ruined unix with bloatware like 'configure' and gcc 'extensionettes'. The repeated rant about memory mapped files (a Multics bedrock feature) has been refuted as showboating hundreds of times by OS designers like my manager at Xerox OSD, the designer of Pilot, and an ex-MIT professor who never drank that Kool aid!
What's happening in OS's right now is that European bloatware is strangling Linux ... The reason Unix got people so thrilled is that it could 'terminate and stay resident' in one single human mind!
by towaway1138 on 3/18/19, 3:50 AM