
The Unix Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf] - frik
http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf
======
hf
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
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.

~~~
toast0
> 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.

I'm not sure that FreeBSD does less than Linux or OS X. There's certainly some
divergence (FreeBSD has an active Linux compatibility layer, but I don't know
if iCBS is still active in Linux; FreeBSD has jails, Linux has containers,
etc), and FreeBSD tends to have less of the try 7 ways to move forward and
then standardize on an 8th way (although, how many firewall apis do we need?),
but I think that's mostly driven by lack of contributions than anything else.

~~~
chubot
Not a FreeBSD expert, but consider just mobile phone patches to Linux (largely
due to Android AFAIK). In this respect, Linux wins by a mile in terms of
functionality (power management) and supported architectures, and I'm sure it
also contributes to the perceived messiness.

Another example: FreeBSD has had jails for a long time, but I believe it
didn't acquire the equivalent of cgroups until very recently. Linux has a LOT
of stuff that only a few people use.

------
thegeomaster

      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.

------
deathanatos
> 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!)

------
microcolonel
> 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
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.

~~~
pjmlp
Had Apple bought Be instead, the outcome would most likely be completely
different.

~~~
donatj
Be, while not Unix at heart did have a bash based CLI.

~~~
pjmlp
Except for the original Mac OS, almost all mainstream OS did have a CLI of
some sort.

Having a bash like CLI is meaningless in terms of means to be a UNIX
compatible OS.

------
jaryd
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
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)

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

~~~
mrmondo
Oh you devil!

------
DonHopkins
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_Syste...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incompatible_Timesharing_System)

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/disast...](http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-
haters/x-windows/disaster.html)

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...](http://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/unix-
haters/x-windows/motif.html)

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)

~~~
DanBC
Thank you for this.

I love discussion between knowledgable people that happens some time after the
event.

A website or podcast that was a tech version of "The Reunion" would probably
be popular.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007x9vc](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007x9vc)

~~~
DonHopkins
Thanks! Jim Gettys is such a nice sweet guy, who's done much great work on so
many things (did you know he was the editor of the HTTP/1.1 specification?), I
sure didn't want him to think I had an axe to grind with him about X-Windows
[1].
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Gettys](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Gettys)

Here's some of his sagely advice, which I'll quote from his wikipedia page:
"He has pointed out a common fallacy among programmers today: that storing
computed values in memory is preferable to recomputing those values later.
This, he claims, is often false on current hardware, given fast CPUs and the
long time it takes to recover from a potential cache miss."

But it's a totally different story about that flaming political loony who
desecrated the Jargon file, misrepresented hacker culture (and himself as a
hacker), flat out lied about not misrepresenting anyone, and always used to
sign himself off as "the mad mastermind of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle
Netnews" but never delivered on any of the hype he promised. But at least he
was honest about being "mad": he still says and stands by things like "In the
U.S., blacks are 12% of the population but commit 50% of violent crimes; can
anyone honestly think this is unconnected to the fact that they average 15
points of IQ lower than the general population?"

I would love to see a retrospective discussion of the people who blew up that
whale!

[1] Yes, I still call it X-Windows in the hopes of annoying X fanatics.

------
DannyBee
The mailing list was a lot funnier :)

I wonder if anyone still has the real archives (there are partial, sanitized
archives).

~~~
frik
archive (sadly sanitized):
[http://www.mindspring.com/~blackhart/](http://www.mindspring.com/~blackhart/)

~~~
DonHopkins
From: AB Subject: jargon file

I strongly urge everyone who reads Unix-Haters to drop a note to er@al.gol.tla
expressing your concern that he may be violating the spirit of the original
jargon file.

Recall that we have not actually -seen- what he has proposed to do, so don't
jump down the man's throat, but I think he could use some reinforcement on the
idea that part of the ITS culture was a healthy disrespect for Unix, and that
for many of us this is still the case. Be reasonable, calm and brief. Don't
antagonize him. just make your point.

It would probably help if you can impress him with your ITS credentials. Like
if you ever helped maintained ITS, or some ITS system program, be sure to
mention that.

From: DC Subject: message to ER

Date: Wed, 19 Dec 90 13:35:25 -0800 From: DC To: er@al.gol.tla

Hi,

I've heard you are working on ai:gls;jargon >, to which I contributed several
entries (which appear also in the published version). It seems to me that the
file documented a culture that no longer exists, because it was tied to a
particular period, particular long-dead machines and networks, and particular
institutions that have changed unrecognizably. It doesn't, therefore, seem
meaningful to revise it.

It is a spendid idea to document (for instance) current unix culture, but such
a document should be clearly distinct from The Hackers' Dictionary, not a
revision. It should have a new title, and perhaps a different format. It
should _not_ include words from jargon > that are not current (as, I think,
relatively few are).

Making a new book a ``revision'' of jargon > would imply a kind of continuity
between late-70s ARPANet culture and early-90s unix culture that simply
doesn't exist. To do so would confuse members of the latter culture and annoy
members of the former. Contemporary unix culture contains many more people
than the group jargon > was written for and about. They would be best served
by an entirely new book that documents their own jokes and terminology in a
way that reflects the contemporary style.

From: CG

Here's the body of my message to him. I seem to have misplaced the headers:

I've seen forwardings of your postings on alt.computers.folklore about the
jargon file and understand that some ITS hackers are less than thrilled by
some of your modifications of the file. It may be that your intentions have
been misrepresented to me, but if not, I have a few things to say.

I was barely an ITS hacker (although I had an account on AI for a while), but
instead went through RSTS, NOS, and Genera before getting stuck with Unix, so
I don't quite have the same purist attitude that some of them may have.
However, if it is indeed true that you're altering insults about Unix to be
about MSDOS instead, this _does_ bother me.

It bothers me because it sounds like you're revising history. New insults
about MSDOS are fine (as well as insults about RSTS, NOS, or Genera), but you
aren't reporting on a culture if you make these changes. To remove the anti-
Unix slurs in a documentation of computer culture would be like rewriting
history to say that Ronald Reagan was elected unanimously and that nobody
opposed any of his policies.

A documentation of the computer culture as it exists on Unix hosts today could
be interesting, but I respectfully request that you not modify the ITS era
entries as you add new ones. You should, however, document what part of the
culture they came from. As I recall, the original jargon file spoke of
Stanfordisms and MITisms.

Most of the original jargon file should be listed as ITSisms. Note that it
would be worth doing the reseach to find out what other cultures they might
exist in such as Multics, Genera, VMS, etc. The computer culture is not a
single culture, but is a number of different cultures. In fact, proper
research should document phrases as saying that they developed in the ITS user
community as such-and-such, and then migrated into the Unix community as so-
and-so.

Certainly, if a phrase or piece of terminology was only used in the ITS
community, it shouldn't be rewritten so that it could be used in the Unix
community. Your purpose should not be to provide people with a collection of
cute things to say, but instead to document what people _do_ say.

I find that it's interesting that none of the registered unix-haters had
anything to do with your version of the file. You'd probably not be getting
jumped on if you'd contacted us and asked if we'd like to review what you were
doing. This file really shouldn't be made Unix-centric, and to allow non-Unix-
philiacs a review might help to keep you intellectually honest.

Besides, the phrase "MSDOS weenie" doesn't have the same ring to it as "Unix
weenie", and "Weenix" can't be translated into anti-MSDOS-speak at all.
"MSWeenos"?

From: DC Subject: ER's reply to me

[ Apparently he found my message less compelling than some of you did.]

Are GLS, RMS, et al. being wedged, is this guy's project being misrepresented
to us, or is he misrepresenting their support? Or what? (Sigh.) (What can you
expect from someone who signs himself ``the mad mastermind of TMN-Netnews?''
We used to throw highschool students off AI for lesser infractions...)]

>From: (ER) Subject: Re: your mail To: DC Date: Wed, 19 Dec 90 18:14:12 EST

> Making a new book a ``revision'' of jargon would imply a kind of continuity
> between late-70s ARPANet culture and early-90s unix culture that simply
> doesn't exist.

I disagree, and so do GS and RS and the other four major authors of the
original Jargon File.

> To do so would confuse members of the latter culture and annoy members of
> the former.

So far, the only people who have seemed either confused or annoyed are a
couple of rather troglodytic ex-ITSers. The UNIX culture loves what I'm doing,
I'm swamped with new entries and supportive email. And I've gotten more help
than criticism from ITS alumni.

Quite frankly, I've concluded that the only people offended by the idea of
jargon 2.x.x are people I don't mind offending. I hope and trust you are not
among them.

Would you like to enter changes or additions to your previous entries, or
submit any new ones?

From: MC

In article <1YqWpR#1YnZJF2ktJM020ODXT8YVbVG=er@al.gol.tla> ER writes:

> On the evidence available to me, [CS] speak[s] for a minority which includes
> none of the principal authors of the file.

> I am doing my very damnedest not to misrepresent anybody; the First Edition
> authors (with whom I regularly discuss my editorial choices) can testify to
> this.

These statements are out-and-out lies.

ER has _never_ communicated any of his editorial choices to _me_ until I took
him to task for it on alt.folklore.computers. Then all he did was send me a
message saying, in effect, "tough shit, ITS and the PDP-10 are dead and it's
too bad if you don't like it."

From what Guy Steele sent me in private, I doubt that he is correctly
representing Guy either.

The issue was _never_ one of PDP-10/ITS vs. Unix. The PDP-10/Unix war was
settled years ago. The issue is whether or not you brand an entire culture
"extinct" just because the environment which birthed that culture has died.
That culture is alive and well today, having successfully transplanted itself
to Unix and reimplementing the beloved features of the old environment on top
of Unix.

From: IH

Perhaps someone should package this stuff up and send it to GLS and RMS (I
never had much of a chance to hack ITS so I don't think I should do it) and
ask if they are being accurately portrayed. If not, one might consider sending
a note to this guy's publisher just to let them know what's going on.

From: PB Date: Thu, 20 Dec 90 19:03:08 EST

To: gs Subject: jaron file redux

hey quux, we have been hearing rumors about some guy out in east overshoe who
intends to publish a revision of the jargon file (as previously lifted by you
off the ITS machines, where it had been a communal construct, and published in
some random fashion). it sounds like what he intends to do is RE-WRITE a bunch
of the entries to change their intent from denigration of unix to denigration
of some pc system (msdos?). that, of course, would be a significant alteration
from the original aim of the file, and a lot of ITS lovers are objecting. this
fellow has been contacted online, and he claims he is working with you, RMS,
and "most of the other original authors", which he claims to number about 4
more. what is the story?

From: GS

The project started out as an expansion and slight revision of the file, with
a view toward eventual distillation into another book. By "the other original
authors" he is referring to the set of names on the first book:

    
    
        Richard Stallman
        Geoff Goodfellow
        Raphael Finkel
        Mark Crispin
        Don Woods
        myself
    

who were on it because they had made substantial contributions both to the
file and to the polishing of the book version. I would certainly not want
anyone to understand from this that these were the only contributors to the
original file!

Anyway, Eric cut loose and published several updated versions of the file to
today's hacker community, which, for better or for worse, is much more UNIX-
oriented than that of ten years ago. He has gathered tremendous amounts of new
material, much of it interesting. To the extent that we augment the file, I
think it's great. Historical revisionism is, however, highly inappropriate,
and there is some debate over the designation and treatment of "obsolete"
entries.

------
fnordfnordfnord
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
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">
    
      <P><B><TT><FONT SIZE=+1>UNIX HATERS Release 2.0 (unixux)</FONT></TT></B></P>
    
      <P><B><TT><FONT SIZE=+1>login: <BLINK><A HREF="password.html">_</A></BLINK></FONT></TT></B></P>
    
      </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
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.

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

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

------
frik
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-
handb...](http://slashdot.org/story/03/04/26/2354245/unix-haters-handbook-
available-online)

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

Classic.

~~~
Karellen
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
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
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
The word you are looking for is "convergence".

