[GoLUG] Unix Hater's Handbook

[Steve Litt]

Unix Hater's Handbook

https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

LOL.

I read the forward and the first three chapters, and scanned the table
of contents. The more I read, the more grateful I am for using a Unix
workalike (Linux) or Unix (OpenBSD). Everything the authors hate, I
love. From the forward I quote:


• “Being small and simple is more important than being complete and
   correct.”
• “You only have to solve 90% of the problem.”
• “Everything is a stream of bytes.”

Unix commands might not be complete, and perhaps it could be argued
that the kernel isn't complete, but I haven't seen any incorrect stuff
in Linux or OpenBSD.

About solving 90% of the problem: This kind of depends on one's
definition of "the problem". In my car, I don't see a Bose Sound System
or Speed Sensitive Steering as part of the problem. Reliably getting
from point A to point B reliably and economically and safely is the
entirety of the problem to me, but only 90% (or less) to some folks.

About "everything is a stream of bytes", well, this isn't completely
true anymore but as to the parts where it is true, it works for me.

Chapter 2 bemoans file deletion being forever. Well yeah, we'd all like
an undelete, but nothing's perfect. Actual Unix users with some
experience under their belts create barriers to disaster, such as
looking three times before using any command with rm in it, using find
to create a shellscript to accomplish multifile operations rather than
making find actually do the operations, and regular backups of all
different types (offsite, onsite, git, bupsky, etc). And I think we all
know to be very, very, *very* careful with loopback devices.

And then there's this paragraph from Chapter 1:

==========================================================

"Like any good drug dealer, AT&T gave away free samples of Unix to
university types during the 1970s. Researchers and students got a
better high from Unix than any other OS. It was cheap, it was
malleable, it ran on relatively inexpensive hardware. And it was
superior, for their needs, to anything else they could obtain. Better
operating systems that would soon be competing with Unix either
required hardware that universities couldn’t afford, weren’t “free,” or
weren’t yet out of the labs that were busily synthesizing them. AT&T’s
policy produced, at no cost, scads of freshly minted Unix hackers that
were psychologically, if not chemically, dependent on Unix."

==========================================================

Exactly! Unix was cheap, portable, and ran on relatively inexpensive
hardware. Very few people had enough money or had a rich enough
employer to use the authors' beloved Multics, Tops, Lisp Machine or
Cedar/Mesa (what's that?). With the advent of CPM, Apple, MS-DOS,
Windows, Mark Williams Unix, BSD and GNU Linux an ordinary middle class
person could have a computer in their apartment and in their workplace.
And thanks to inexpensive computers and operating systems, a generation
of computer professionals have been able to self-learn most aspects of
IT, which is lucky because with today's rate of change, employers can't
afford to train their people.

I *would* like to try out a Lisp machine though. Maybe I'll install
Emacs.


SteveT

Steve Litt 
http://444domains.com