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Unix-Haters Handbook Available Online
prostoalex writes "The Unix-Haters Handbook, publication year 1994, is now available online for free as a single PDF file. Apparently some suburban Seattle company has agreed to host this 3.5MB file on its servers. The anti-foreword is written by no other but Dennis Ritchie, who proclaims: '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.'" This is what should happen to more out-of-print books.
heh-heh! the gui IS the kernel. the most funny part I read about this was a description of microsoft trying to make a server 2k3 command-line version. "but then you won't be able to use the printing system b/c you need to use all the device drawing stuff ... oh well, we'll keep on trying" . these guys never seem to learn now, do they :-D
I actually have it in paperback form, and it comes with a Unix barfbag. A lot of the points made in the book are still quite valid, but a lot of them are things that have been fixed in the last 10 years. When placed at the appropriate time, you have to realize that it does a decent job of describing the worst parts of Unix from the views of VMS users, among others. Like /., it makes no pretense of being a balanced view.
My main gripe is that they confuse the Internet with Unix. So an entire chapter is devoted to Usenet. That was written before spam, I'm sure the author would be able to write even more vitriol in that category.
I'd love to see it updated, particularly given that so many of the gripes have been addressed and fixed in the world of FS/OSS.
Probably my favorite quote that really needs an update: "Unix was no designed for the Mac." (page 18 of the PDF)
Michael
Do you have ESP?
I read this book when it came out, when I was just a mere youth in the world of Unix. I actually learned a lot about Unix, both the history and actual day-to-day usage. It's clearly authored by a collection of people who love to hate unix and hate to love unix.
In the intervening nine years, a lot of the criticisms in this book have been addressed. Even at the time it was released, this was becoming true. A lot of the issues in the book have a solution, and its name is "Perl". But don't fool yourself; Unix still sucks in a lot of ways. The chapters criticizing X, for example, are unfortunately far too true today.
I hope the people who read this get the joke; that only a group of people intimately familiar with Unix could have produced such a book.
The Unix Hater's Handbook is a classic, and should be read especially by UNIX/Linux fans. I always used to force my minions^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hstudents to read it (until one of my students kept it) so they would have a better understanding of where UNIX had been, and what aspects of it were suboptimal.
A lot of what TUHH rags on has long since been improved.. who mucks around with /bin/sh, sed and awk now that we have Perl and Python, after all?
Other things haven't been improved much on the UNIX side, and TUHH includes some important lessons about why that is, and what the real world benefits and costs of that are.
I'm glad that this is available in some form again now, but it's not the same without the friendly UNIX Barf Bag bound into the back cover.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
I've got the print version of the book. Witty, clever, and sadly on-target in quite a lot of its observations. (I'm still dismayed to see a greater-than character in front of "From" when it's the first word on a line in an email message. There's just no excuse for that in 2003.) And I'm a die-hard Unix lover (logged on using a Silent 700 when I was in 3rd grade).
But I was turned off that the Unix Haters mailing list was so exclusive: you had to write some similarly erudite and novel observation on how awful Unix was before you'd be let into the club. Clever invective to be kept a careful few? Sounds a bit fearful to me.
Regardless, it's been years since the book's been out, and Unix still has many warts. The book (and presumably, the mailing list, although I wouldn't know), could serve as a requirements document on how you'd go about improving Unix in general.
What did the authors offer as a better UI? No, not Windows. Not Mac. Some arcane LISP machine was usually the machine of choice. Sorry, I live in the real world and have to earn a paycheck.
This documents has many excellent points. When you are a green developer just into college you are sort of brainwashed into the "UNIX is the best. PCs and Macs are just toys compared to the incredible power of UNIX." When I encountered things I just assumed it was my lack of knowledge or understanding. UNIX wouldn't have faults or problems!
Of course, many of these problem have been resolved since this book was written. Unfortunately, far too many have remained and have many their way into Linux.
A) Cryptic Command Names. Still there in Linux
B) "Unix was like Homer, handed down as oral wisdom."
Man, this is so true. I got most of my UNIX knowledge passed down to me by upperclassmen and professors. It is amazing how much training it takes in UNIX to do something simple in Windows. For example, recursively searching through a subtree for some text in a file.
C) Terminal Insanity. Still there in many ways. VT100 pops up its ugly head decades after it should have been killed.
D) The X-Windows Disaster. X-Windows is what first made me question UNIX's superiority. Dang X sucks. Bad. What a mess! "Motif Self-Abuse Kit" made me laugh because my brief experience programming Motif was one of the worst in my life. It was a mess of void pointers and pointers to functions that was an absolute pain to program.
E) Make "Unfortunately, in their zeal to be general, many
Unix tools forget about the quick and easy part."
I've never found a make that I liked. You should not have to spend hours programming the freakin makefile. Nor should you have to debug whitespace because you have an extra space or tab.
Reminds me of once at work---a publisher added a page to a chapter which ended on a left, meaning that all the following pages had to be incremented by 2---not that big a deal, even in Quark XPress (and trivial in the books which I do using TeX or FrameMaker), except that the index had already been done. While everyone else in the shop was busy trying to figure out how many people would have to be diverted to manually updating the index I dumped it to Quark XPress Tags, copied that to my Mac running Mac OS X, worked up a four line awk script to increment all page numbers after the new page by 2, processed the file with the script, brought it back into Quark, et voila!
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Neither are Linux or BSD. What's your point?
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
the homepage for the book is on a Microsoft server but the pdf is on a small server where space was donated... this is mentioned in the slashdot blurb but then again who even reads the post let alone the article.
I once asked an older coworker and Solaris guru what happened with the Unix-haters list. He told me that it stopped being quite so funny once Windows NT came along.
I'm certainly not blind to the faults of Unix- there have been many, many failed technologies that were more advanced than the crap we have to work with now. I think the reason so many people profess their love for Unix now is that the remaining alternative is pretty godawful, and many of us have had limited opportunity to work with anything better. You can pine for VMS all you want, but whatever made it such a badass operating system seems to have been discarded in the making of NT.
Perhaps in twenty years we'll be mocking old MS-bashing Slashdot posts as we attempt to deal with crashing PalmOS Metaverse servers and brag about how our Windows 2020 boxes are *real* computers.
I doubt it. The reason so many people prefer Linux (or other UNIXes) to Windows is the UNIX design philosophies, the rich history, and the community spirit. Bill Gates has explicitly stated his disdain for all three.
another thing i used to do back in the DOS days is use the ascii character 255 in filenames... it's legal in a filename... but it looks exactly like a space on the console; most people are none the wiser when they saw a file with no name. They didnt know how to delete it if they did notice it... It was funny as hell torturing people with a single file that filled up their entire HD with something they couldnt erase... every system has its insecurities.. no matter how secure you try to make a machine.. someone will find a way to get into it... most of what i read in the book is garbage.. how about this one: redirect C: to A: then someone does format A: and it clears their HD /u /autotest into autoexec.bat :P
or throw in format C:
any system is exploitable.. noone is absolutely safe unless the machines are turned off
p r m t h s
Ok, so, I think everyone on /. knows that I like GNU/Linux. So, you expect that what follows is going to be a ranting rave about how much this book sucks, right? Wrong. This book is great, and here's why.
Many here have pointed out that alot of these very same problems exist elsewhere. Hidden files are a social-engineering security problem on Windows and Mac as well; likewise with undeleteable files.
So what? Saying, "well, their OS sucks too" doesn't make our OS any better. Since when is it ok for me to accept my own flaws just because everyone else around me also has those same flaws, or others?
The stuff written in this book shouldn't be seen as MS/Mac propaganda. I think most people who are going to be reading it are GNU/Linux users, and aren't going to be switching anytime soon, irrelevant of how much the authors hate *nix. (btw, if *nix sucks so much, why is Mac basing OSX around it, and why do we keep hearing rumors about MS doing such as well?).
There are many valid and important criticisms of *nix in that book. We should consider ourselves lucky that this book is narrowly targetted to *nix and doesn't address any of the same problems win Windows and MacOS -- we've received solid constructive criticism which others haven't, and that's a good thing.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Qualification: a while a CLI can manage files, its major function is not as a file manager.
CLIs may not be intuitive, but they are powerful in that they can run commands with various changable options. And they make debugging/testing programs a lot easier.
What CLI's are not good for is general file management, which is one reason why modern linux distros come with GUI file managers and why I use one for managing my files. But if anyone removed the terminals and shells from my computer I'd go insane - I'm always cursing the CLI (or what passes for it) in Win2K at work and wishing there was a decent implementation of BASH for windows ...
An obvious but incorrect analogy. First, Windows isn't displacing for UNIX/Linux at all--UNIX/Linux is going strong, in spite of Microsoft's business tactics. Second, most people don't explicitly choose Windows at all, they just get it by default.
So, how UNIX displaced VMS/Multics isn't at all analogous to the relationship between Windows and UNIX/Linux today. And the thing I criticize Microsoft for isn't primarily the quality of their software, it's that they are not playing on a level playing field. If they were, then I think market forces would take care of Microsoft's software quality issues one way or another.
So what you're saying is that the computer shouldn't respond to a command giving to it? You use the word "stupidly" as if the computer can think; until quantum mechanics/physics and energy become everyday run of the mill topics saying something like "because the computer stupidly executed a destructive typo" is a silly statement.
How hard can it be? MS-DOS has done this kind of thing for over a decade:
C:> del *.*
Are you sure (Y/N)?
Unix stupidly defaults to a "don't ask no matter what" mentality. It will delete every file on the OS with one command and not so much as even ask if you are sure.
Right that's why "rm -i" exist. "Request confirmation before attempting to remove each file, regardless of the file's permissions, or whether or not the standard input device is a terminal. The -i option overrides any previous -f options."
That sounds really great. I want to delete hundreds of files in a directory and I have a choice of the default delete-everything-without-asking or ask-me-for-each-file. What if I want to delete 553 log files with the name *log and I accidentally hit [Carriage Return] rather than the "L" key?
With power comes responsibility, that's just the way life is.
Bull****! It's an operating system, not the launch codes for nuclear missiles. An OS should be written so that it has reasonable safeguards. How is rm * so much more "powerful" than del *.*? It's not. The only difference is that the former will delete everything without even asking while the latter has some minimal safeguards built in.
The original poster was 100% correct. Get over it and move on.
Dennis Ritchie did just that: witness Plan 9 and Inferno. Or even those versions of Research Unix after V7. Unfortunately, the focus of AT&T and later Lucent was on commercialization, so the innovations found in these products were essentially inaccessible to the communities who could most appreciate and further them.
It's a sad fact that the original creators of Unix had very little to do with its evolution after 1980 or so.
A lot of us were actually lispm hackers by then, and unix-haters was a reaction to the AI Lab and LCS decommissioning the lispm's in favor of Suns. The unix-haters list used to be twenex-haters back before hating TOPS-20 became an irrelevant exercise. I also remember back in the day when DWeise posted a note saying that we would all be programming in Windows in 10 years, which nobody believed at the time, because he was talking about Windows 3.0 with "cooperative multitasking..."
I also helped write part of the book and then went on to be an OS hacker with the CMU Mach project.
Can't afford? The largest part of the microsoft market share is pirated copies of MS Whatever. They don't have to afford it.
I'd say mostly anybody using Windows ever though of moving to Linux because of the cheap factor. ALL of the moves i've seen fall in unrelated categories:
- Geek / coolness factor
- Institutional, tired of MS
- Wanted to tried / liked it
- Needed stability
Nobody learns Linux because of the chepo factor, I can understand some companies liking the cheap factor, but those companies hire guys that do like unixes, the boss in never ever going to learn unix, they will just use gnome and openoffice (or crossover).
unfinished: (adj.)