Re: Learning from history - The UNIX-Hater's Handbook (Peter Quirk)

On 2003-09-14, David Utidjian <[email protected]> wrote:
>> You will find a wealth of material in the UNIX-Hater's Handbook at
>> http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf. This work was published in
>> 1994, just as Dee-Ann was getting interested in computers. Little has
>> been done to correct the deficiencies described therein except POSIX
>> standardization of the shell and some APIs.
> 
> I disagree. On what do you base your assertion that little has been
> done?

Facts. Opinions. (-:

a) applications crash, leaving core dump files lying around (or not). No
   debugger pops up. If you had unsaved state, it is lost unless you can
   pry it from the core file, which is nicely named "core", without any
   indication of which program left it (BSD names them "program.core",
   which is a little better)
b) Command syntax is garbled (think also shell quoting rules). Nasty
   command names abound. For which command is "grep" an abbreviation?
   "sed"? "tar"? "cut"? "paste"?? Are these programs still used for
   these purposes?
c) When you encounter a kernel bug (and subsequent crash), you have
   lost.
d) You get to write programs in languages such as C, which force you to
   go through a cycle of
   write-compile(&fix-errors)-run-crash-debug-(&fix-errors). This
   development cycle, I'm sure, is responsible for "good enough" tools
   such as make[1] and other berkeley abominations.
e) The entire Unix Hater's Handbook chapter on X window with the
   exception of speed issues still holds. As an addition, there is now
   XAuth and SSH forwarding to worry about.
   
And some others. Life does not have to be like this; and it wasn't, for
some users of machines, even back in the 1980s. See the amazing videos
made by Rainer Joswig (on http://lemonodor.com/archives/000441.html#000441
- be sure to follow all the links). Also, see
http://kogs-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/~moeller/symbolics-info/symbolics.html
for more resources.

Unix or Linux is by far not the last word in User Interface
Design. People have gotten it right (or at least, more right)
before. And, amazingly, this "getting right" wasn't done in UNIX. There
are amazingly useful data structures out there. Why then do we need to
use tools that were written in the 1970s, to fix 1970s issues, operating
on One data structure, the stream of bytes without structure, most of
which focus on working around the issues arising from the use of exactly
this data structure?

Hmpf. Back to your question above, much has changed. Much has been
done. But not much (save for its speed) in UNIX nor Linux has changed to
the better.

[1] the author of `make' was reputed to not have fixed an early bug in
    the file syntax (you have to prefix every "command" line with a TAB
    character; it will barf when it encounters things like 8 spaces)
    because he already had a few 10 users. This bug is still present in
    "modern" make implementations.

-- 
Andreas Fuchs, <[email protected]>, [email protected], antifuchs