> 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.
1. You start and stop services with 'systemctl start/stop nginx'. But logs for that service can be read through an easy-to-remember 'journalctl -xeu nginx.service'. Why not 'systemctl logs nginx'? Nobody knows.
2. If you look at the built-in help for systemctl, the top-level options list things like `--firmware-setup` and `--image-policy`.
3. systemd unifies devices, mounts, and services into unit files with consistent syntax. Except where it doesn't. For example, there's a way to specify a retry policy for a regular service, but not for mount units. Why? Nobody knows.
(To be clear, I _like_ systemd. But it definitely follows the true Unix philosophy of being wildly internally inconsistent.)
As someone in the midst of transitioning to Linux for the first time ever, the thing is: I still kinda hate Unix, but my AI friends (Claude Code / Codex) are very good at Unix/Linux and the everything is a file nature of it is amenable to AI helping me make my OS do what I want in a way that Windows definitely isn't.
They certainly came up with a lot of good one-liners for this book.
I wonder why Dennis Ritchie was so infuriated though. He criticizes them for wanting simple functionality, but it's not because language is a powerful tool for solving problems it's because it limits the potential of the platform to it's functionality (which has been simplified and in of itself limited).
So this is confusing to me. Using language to solve problems is the advantage that Unix offers. But, neither the authors nor Dennis care about this? Or they do care in limited ways, but ultimately it's about something else?
As a side point, I believe David Cutler, the venerable OS engineer who programmed and designed three OSes, did not like Unix very much back in the 90s. I wonder what was the reason, and did he change his mind later?
The EMACS hater handbook. Under a GFDL license, of course.
No multithreading, I/O locks under GNUs/eww, glacial slow email header parsing under GNUs, huge badass file for RMAIL if you don't like GNUs (instead of parsing MailDir) and so on.
I have a hard copy of this from back in the day. It’s a great read and a mixture of historical artefact and still relevant criticism.
e.g. It’s really interesting reading about LISP machines but no-one’s building a new one. Equally, all the criticism of sendmail and csh is valid but no-one uses them anymore either.
Most of the reliability criticisms have been addressed over the years but people are still trying to address the design of C, usually by replacing it. Equally, sh remains a problematic scripting language but at least it’s reliably there, unlike many of its many alternatives.
The good news is that we now have alternative UI's in web/mobile, microkernel-based systems, and unikernels in high-level languages... all in production use.
Lots (most) OSes had a process concept. But in Unix, they not only existed, they were everywhere, they were dynamic, and they were "cheap". They were user accessible. A process with its ubiquitous stdin/out interface gave us great composablilty. We can click the processes together like legos.
For example, VMS had processes. But after 4 years of using it, I never tossed processes around using it like I did on Unix. I never "shelled out" of an editor. I never & something into the background. Just never came up. One terminal, one process.
On Unix, however, oh yea. Pipe construct on the command line, bang out of the editor, :r! in vi. And the eco-system the was created out of this simple concept. The "Unix Way(tm)".
And anything was a process. A C program. A shell script. At this level, everything was a "system language".
Then, They (those Unix wizard folks) made networking a well behaved citizen in this process stdin/out world. `inetd` could turn ANYTHING (because everything had stdin/out) into a network server. This command is magic: `ls | cpio -ov | rsh otherhost cat > /dev/tape`
Does `ls` know anything about file archives? No. Does `cpio` know anything about networking, or tape drives? No. Heck, `cat` doesn't know anything about tape drives.
You just could not, back in the day, plumb processes and computers together trivially like you could with Unix. Humans could do this. They didn't need to be wizard status, "admins", guys in white coats locked in the raised floor rooms, huffing Halon on the side. Assuming you could grok the arcane syntaxes (which, absolutely, were legion), you could make Unix do amazing things.
This flexibility allowed me to make all sorts of Rube-Goldbergian constructs of data flows and processes. Unix has always been empowering, and not constraining, once you accept it for what it is.
OK I have a question. I've been trying to track down a Unix book that was similar from that time period, covering command-line tools and shell programming. It had some funny cartoons in between the text. One particular cartoon featured a man who had spent too much time at the command line and was using single-word commands for everything, e.g. when he needed to send a letter he would point to it and say "MAIL" and when someone knocked on his door he would point to it and say "ENTER". Does anyone else remember that one?
Asked ChatGPT and it told me the book might be "The Unix Programming Environment". It happens that the second link on Google is a pdf so I took a brief look, but did not find any cartoon. I asked it a second time and it said "UNIX for the Impatient", which does look like the one but I didn't find any pdf. Hopefully it helps.
21 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 38.0 ms ] threadThe Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40110729 - April 2024 (87 comments)
The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38464715 - Nov 2023 (139 comments)
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) [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)
> 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.
Definitely the politest way anyone has ever been told to eat shit in human history.
Like:
1. You start and stop services with 'systemctl start/stop nginx'. But logs for that service can be read through an easy-to-remember 'journalctl -xeu nginx.service'. Why not 'systemctl logs nginx'? Nobody knows.
2. If you look at the built-in help for systemctl, the top-level options list things like `--firmware-setup` and `--image-policy`.
3. systemd unifies devices, mounts, and services into unit files with consistent syntax. Except where it doesn't. For example, there's a way to specify a retry policy for a regular service, but not for mount units. Why? Nobody knows.
(To be clear, I _like_ systemd. But it definitely follows the true Unix philosophy of being wildly internally inconsistent.)
I wonder why Dennis Ritchie was so infuriated though. He criticizes them for wanting simple functionality, but it's not because language is a powerful tool for solving problems it's because it limits the potential of the platform to it's functionality (which has been simplified and in of itself limited).
So this is confusing to me. Using language to solve problems is the advantage that Unix offers. But, neither the authors nor Dennis care about this? Or they do care in limited ways, but ultimately it's about something else?
The EMACS hater handbook. Under a GFDL license, of course.
No multithreading, I/O locks under GNUs/eww, glacial slow email header parsing under GNUs, huge badass file for RMAIL if you don't like GNUs (instead of parsing MailDir) and so on.
e.g. It’s really interesting reading about LISP machines but no-one’s building a new one. Equally, all the criticism of sendmail and csh is valid but no-one uses them anymore either.
Most of the reliability criticisms have been addressed over the years but people are still trying to address the design of C, usually by replacing it. Equally, sh remains a problematic scripting language but at least it’s reliably there, unlike many of its many alternatives.
It's my favorite OS.
And I like it for its fundamental process model.
That combined with stdin/out and pipes.
All stitched together with a process aware shell.
Lots (most) OSes had a process concept. But in Unix, they not only existed, they were everywhere, they were dynamic, and they were "cheap". They were user accessible. A process with its ubiquitous stdin/out interface gave us great composablilty. We can click the processes together like legos.
For example, VMS had processes. But after 4 years of using it, I never tossed processes around using it like I did on Unix. I never "shelled out" of an editor. I never & something into the background. Just never came up. One terminal, one process.
On Unix, however, oh yea. Pipe construct on the command line, bang out of the editor, :r! in vi. And the eco-system the was created out of this simple concept. The "Unix Way(tm)".
And anything was a process. A C program. A shell script. At this level, everything was a "system language".
Then, They (those Unix wizard folks) made networking a well behaved citizen in this process stdin/out world. `inetd` could turn ANYTHING (because everything had stdin/out) into a network server. This command is magic: `ls | cpio -ov | rsh otherhost cat > /dev/tape`
Does `ls` know anything about file archives? No. Does `cpio` know anything about networking, or tape drives? No. Heck, `cat` doesn't know anything about tape drives.
You just could not, back in the day, plumb processes and computers together trivially like you could with Unix. Humans could do this. They didn't need to be wizard status, "admins", guys in white coats locked in the raised floor rooms, huffing Halon on the side. Assuming you could grok the arcane syntaxes (which, absolutely, were legion), you could make Unix do amazing things.
This flexibility allowed me to make all sorts of Rube-Goldbergian constructs of data flows and processes. Unix has always been empowering, and not constraining, once you accept it for what it is.