Ask Unix Co-Creator Rob Pike

Today we return to our Slashdot interview roots with a "Call for questions" for Rob "Commander" Pike, who has been involved in the development of many modern programming concepts, GUI advances, character sets, and operating systems. We'll email 10 - 12 of the highest-moderated questions to Rob and post his answers as soon as he gets them back to us.

Comments

How do I

[techsoldaten]

How do I get to my C:\ drive on a Unix box?

M

Re:How do I

[viva_fourier]

And, can you put an AOL icon on Unix somewhere, so that I can access the internet?

Plan9

[mirko]

Plan 9 was supposed to go even further than Unix went, does it really looks like to you that it's been conceived according to a similar approach ???

Re:Plan9

[Spyffe]

Rob,

Right now, there are a large number of research kernels. Plan 9, Inferno, AtheOS, Syllable, K42, Mach, L4, etc. all have their own ideas about the future of the kernel. But they all end up implementing a POSIX interface because the UNIX userland is the default.

The kernel space needs to be invigorated using a new userland that demands new and innovative functionality from the underlying system. Suppose you were to design a user environment for the next 30 years. What would the central abstractions be? What sort of applications would it support?

Biggest problem with Unix

[akaina]

Recently on the Google Labs Aptitude Test there was a question: "What's broken with Unix? How would you fix it?"

What would you have put?

Re:Biggest problem with Unix

[Anonymous Coward]

If you know what's wrong and know how to fix it, why don't you fix it already! The source is out there.

Re:Biggest problem with Unix

[hackstraw]

Recently on the Google Labs Aptitude Test there was a question: "What's broken with Unix? How would you fix it?"

I saw this google labs apt question, and while I've become numb to most of UNIX's issues and cannot think of a generic across the board (ie, cross vendor) "broken" thing except why the hell is UNIX so picky about 1) unmounting filesystems "that are in use" and 2) why the hell there is a 'D' run state that is completely uninterruptable?* The 2nd one really baffles me, and the first is just annoying, and fuser or some vendor specific tool can (sometimes) point you to the offending process that is using the filesystem. I found out today that fuser does not work on linux with the kernel NFS daemon sharing a filesystem and I try to unmount it. Annoying, but not as fundamentally broken as #2 in my opinion.

Another thing that I see as "broken" in UNIX is that there is no normal/standardized/sane way of installing software. Debian gets it the closest, but the LSB picked RPM for some insane reason for package mismanagement on Linux.

* For those that don't know, if there is something wrong with a disk subsystem, and a process tries to access that disk subsystem, the process is in an uninterruptable "disk wait state", that cannot be corrected without rebooting the computer. One can ususally safely ignore the processes stuck in this state, but its kinda irritating because it can often bring the system load up by one for each stuck process, yet it does not appear to hurt performance any.

Re:Biggest problem with Unix

[CondeZer0]

I think that he and the Bell Labs folks already answered those questions over 10 years ago:

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/9.html
(See specially the first section: Motivation)

uriel

Re:Biggest problem with Unix

[OrangeTide]

grep works quite nicely with utf8. even an ancient version of grep. as long as it's 8-bit clean and you give it search queries in the same encoding as your file. (like 8859-1 for 8859-1 files, utf8 for utf8 files).

The whole idea of utf8 is to have the least impact on existing software. There are encoding sets that do break text editors and grep. Like some of the asian multibyte encodings.

if you grep for a utf8 sequence in a binary file it will work exactly the same as if you grep for a latin1 sequence in a binary file or a US ASCII.

Some problems with utf8 are that strlen() can no longer be used to determine how many monospaced positions a string will fill. you have to use mblen() which requires you to know the lenght of your multibyte string. (multibyte strings don't have to be null terminated in all encoding systems, utf8 happens to support it, but mblen() isn't interested in that).

binary and text files are still the same on *nix. you can't have a newline as part of a utf8 multibyte sequence for example. fgets() works on utf8 the same as it always has. The following code will work with usascii, utf8 and iso-8859-x. the code obviously is unaware of the encoding scheme, but the important parts are the same in at least thoses encodings for it to work.

#include
int main() {
char buf[1024];
while(fgets(buf,sizeof buf,stdin)) {
fputs(buf, stdout);
}
return 0;
}

ps- if you want to grep binary files I would recommend piping the binary though the "strings" command first. it can yield better results. You can specify -e if you want "strings" to sniff out alternate encoding types. (including utf16)

Re:Biggest problem with Unix

[geeber]

Given that Rob Pike works for Google, I wouldn't be surprised if he wrote that question himself...

Re:Biggest problem with Unix

[hackstraw]

1) File systems that are "in use" cannot be unmounted because there may be uncommitted writes to them. When an application writes to a filesystem, the data is not immediately written to the disk for performance reasons.

I don't care. I'm unmounting a filesystem for a reason, and I'm going to kill the offending processes anyway. I'm root dammit! Heh.

Also, its just inconsistant that I cannot unmount a filesystem, but I can do rm -rf on the entire filesystem. Another thing that gets me is that a filesystem can be "in use" just because an app is using it as its current working directory. No open files, no uncommited writes, just because some program is sitting there it can't be unmounted, but again I can rm -rf it. (Yes, I do know that rm -rf only removes the linkcount by one, and the files might actually really still be there and not there at the same time.)

2) The 'D' state does not exist because there is a "problem" with the file system. Processes are but into the D state because two processes are trying to access the same file or resource at the same time.

Thats not true. A 'D' state is when an app is waiting for a disk or tape, it has nothing to do with filesystems, its a device issue. Regardless, I should be able to kill the process vs having to reboot to get rid of it. There should be no software reason for rebooting a computer besides a fundamental OS change.

Re:Biggest problem with Unix

[mikefe]

Actually, the refuse to umount if there are users in the mount is part of the POSIX or SUS specifications.

Linux does not have a problem with it. That's why it has the -l option.

-l Lazy unmount. Detach the filesystem from the filesystem hierarchy now, and cleanup all references to the filesystem as soon as it is not busy anymore. (Requires kernel 2.4.11 or later.)

Re:Biggest problem with Unix

[evil_engin33r]

Who cares--memory and hdd space are cheap.

Re:Biggest problem with Unix

[defile]

Recently on the Google Labs Aptitude Test there was a question: "What's broken with Unix? How would you fix it?"

The moment I saw that question I said it must be a trick. UNIX develops by evolution, not by dictation. Whenever an individual change is dictated it almost never survives on its merits.

UNIX is beyond the comprehension of any one. One can introduce a change, but it is up to NATURAL LAW to ultimately decide if the change lives or dies.

That said, pttys, fifos and ioctls do in fact blow.

OK, here's the obligatory

[w.p.richardson]

Looking back, what would you have done differently? Anything?

resolv.conf

[Flashbck]

why was the 'e' ever removed from resolv.conf?!!?!?

Re:resolv.conf

[tchuladdiass]

Probably to match up with the "creat" system call

Re:resolv.conf

[JUSTONEMORELATTE]

Ahh, you see, UNIX was created back in the day when we couldn't afford vowels, and many consonants.
As such, common commands had to be shortened a little bit:
"Copy" becomes "cp"
"List" becomes "ls"
"Rename" becomes "mv" and so on.

Re:resolv.conf

[roalt]

Why was the 'e' ever removed from resolv.conf?!!?!?

That was bcaus the -ky on my kyboard was not working as it should in thos days.

Re:resolv.conf

[GoofyBoy]

This must be the most awkward question you can give a programmer.

Can you justify why you named your objects/variables/files years ago?

Re:resolv.conf

[orangesquid]

Short commands are easier to type, especially on slow TTL hardware where several context switches have to happen for every single keystroke.

Early unix also had a 12-letter filename limit.
I don't know if that included the NUL or not; if it did, then resolv.conf makes sense, since you might want to make a backup copy named resolv.conf~ or such. Also, early fortran had a 6-letter symbol name limit; this might be the reason for creat (so _CREAT would fit within the maximum 6 letters?)

DISCLAIMED: Just some ideas, dunno if any of this is correct!

Re:resolv.conf

[Greyfox]

I usually just blame it on the drugs. It was the 70's after all...

Re:resolv.conf

[AJWM]

That would explain the problem with the creat(2) system call too.

Oh wait, that would be crat(2).

Re:resolv.conf

[red floyd]

14 letter. Each directory entry was 16 bytes -- 2 bytes for inode, 14 for filename.

Re:resolv.conf

[AJWM]

The early unix filename limit was 14 chars. That gave you two bytes for the inode number in a 16-byte directory entry.

Early C also had the 6 letter limit, not so much in the language itself as a limitation in early linkers/loaders, which only distinguished the first few characters of an identifier. (So for sanity's sake you limited the identifiers in your program to that so you would accidentally get a collision. This is one reason that old C code looks, well, old. (And why some old C coders still tend toward using short variable names.)

Re:resolv.conf

[the chao goes mu]

UNMNT? Seems a little clearer. Especially as u- is vague, meaning both "un-" and "user-" (umount/umask v. ulimit)

Re:resolv.conf

[MarkGriz]

That was bcaus the -ky on my kyboard was not working as it should in thos days.

If you're getting KY on your keyboard, maybe you should look for a girlfriend instead :-)

Re:resolv.conf

[telstar]

"Ahh, you see, UNIX was created back in the day when we couldn't afford vowels, and many consonants.

• I blame that bitch Vanna...

Re:resolv.conf

[asdfghjklqwertyuiop]

resolv.conf is exactly 11 chars

exactly 11 characters? As opposed to filenames 11.0001 characters long?

Re:resolv.conf

[ohad_l]

It would seem that the developers of Unix had a lot of fun trying to skew the statistics so that e would not be the most common English letter.

Apple and Unix

[Anonymous Coward]

What are your thoughts on Apple's use of Unix.

Re:Apple and Unix

[The Phantom Buffalo]

Do you consider all trademark law to be legal nitpicking?

Re:What do you think of the SCO vs IBM?

[stecoop]

Add to the question about what he thinks of the government forcing Bell to sell of the Unix OS (because the parent company was considered a monopoly) inlight of today's litigation wrangling.

The future?

[xenostar]

What do you see in the far future of operating systems, now that great advances in the way we think about computers, such as quantum computing, have been made.

Is Linux "unix"?

[Doc Ruby]

Is Linux "unix"? What did Unix get wrong, but was too late to change by the time that you realized it, that Linux can still get right, while it's still young?

Re:Is Linux "unix"?

[Doc Ruby]

That's why I made the subtle distinction in my post beween "unix" and "Unix" (and your "UNIX"). Especially with the SCO scams hanging above our necks, I'm interested in what Pike says is "unix". Perhaps it transcends the code, the trademark, the APIs, and has become a style, or something in between.

Re:Is Linux "unix"?

[JabberWokky]

No, they say what is and what is not legally considered Unix. The popular definition includes many other operating systems that are similar.

Tomatos are legally a vegetable[1], scientifically a fruit, and considered by many people to be either one. Champaign is technically only from a certain region in France, in American common usage it is just about any sparkling wine. Terms can often be approached legally or semantically. "Unix" in this case is short for "that OS that you created", not "an OS certified by the OpenGroup". If they dubbed, say, MS-DOS 4.01 Unix, it may be legally Unix but most people wouldn't consider it "real Unix".

[1] In America, for tariff reasons. Decision of the Supreme Court in late 1800s.

--
Evan

Are you suprised at the longevity of Unix?

[sgant]

When you were creating it, did you in your wildest dreams ever think that 30 years people would still be using it on a daily basis? Was it designed from the beginning to grow and be added onto?

Unix co-creator?

[hruntrung]

Pardon my ignorance, but I was under the impression that Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson created Unix (Unics), on disused hardware at Bell Labs.

Am I incorrect in this belief? Someone, kindly, clarify the matter.

Languages

[btlzu2]

Hello!

Maybe this is an overly-asked question, but I still often ponder it. Does object-oriented design negate or diminish the future prospects of Unix's continuing popularity?

I've developed in C (which I still love), but lately, I've been doing a lot of purely object-oriented development in Java. Using things like delegation and reusable classes have made life so much easier in many respects. Since the *nixes are so dependent upon C, I was wondering what future you see in C combined with Unix. Like I said, I love C and still enjoy developing in Unix, but there has to be a point where you build on your progress and the object-oriented languages, in my opinion, seem to be doing that.

Thank you for all your contributions!!!

Re:Languages

[five18pm]

It still is difficult to leave C. Object-oriented languages go to great lengths to hide data (That object is off-limits boy!), but sometimes you need to access data, that too, immediately. That you can get only C (and in that ugly kludge, C++).

Of course, you can also build object orientation in C, it is difficult, not impossible. Just look at the Unix file system and drivers. It uses both delegation and reusable classes. I know atleast one professor who taught object orientation with Unix file system as example!

Obvious (and probably redundant)

[Camel Pilot]

What do you think of the Evil called SCO?

Emacs or Vi?

[Neil Blender]

nt

View on linux

[noselasd]

What are your views on the free/OpenSource Unix like operating systems, such as Linux and the *BSDs ?

Backtracking

[Antony-Kyre]

Is it possible to design a computer so you can backtrack in progress? A method where it records perhaps the last three minutes, and you could click on something, and rewind your computer just like a video? And the hard drive would be at that state? Perhaps with intervals of five seconds. This would go way beyond RAID. (Not sure if I explained this properly.)

Language for new OS's

[Anonymous Coward]

The C programming language was written for and spread by the Unix operating system. While it's still a useful tool, and far better than the wholly untyped BCPL that preceded it, C is really starting to show its age. Is there an existing programming language that you would recommend for the implementation of operating systems? Would you recommend creating a new language for a new OS, as was done with Unix? Would you recommend the creation of new OS's at all?

Re:Language for new OS's

[HawkingMattress]

Yep, good question. When you think about it, conceving an OS, and the language which will build it at the same time must be something totally mind blowing.
Given the power computers have today, the omniprecense of networks, OO and so on, i'm pretty sure that if one conceived an OS that way today and tried to rethink everything from the beginning, he could end up with concepts we don't even dream of.After all we all still think inside concepts which were found 40 years ago, even in network terms.
Things like plan9 are cool, but there is probably *much* more to be done, and the same thing can be done on the windows side.

Innovation and patents

[Zocalo]

With so many of your ideas being used with such ubiquity in modern operating systems, what is your stance on the issue of patenting of software and other "intellectual property" concepts? Assuming that business isn't going to let IP patents go away as they strive to build patent stockpiles reminiscent of the nuclear arms buildup during the cold war, how would you like to see the issue resolved?

CLI

[Moby Cock]

Has the Command Line Interface become outdated? What are your thoughts on the CLI and if you had to 'do it all again' would the CLI be as prevalent?

Re:CLI

[Naikrovek]

The command line was the ONLY interface when unix was first developed. X came long after the CLI and even if you're running Windows you still use the command line from time to time. If you don't you're just not using the power of your system, in my opinion.

raw text is the only true inter-system communication protocol. my cats and my computer understand a lot of the same words. my cat can't type but i can, and my computer can't understand the noises my cat makes, but i do - command pipes! where would we be without those, and those ONLY work in the CLI! we would be in the stone ages of computing without the CLI.

The many Flavors of Unix

[pillageplunder]

Rob, do you see in the near or even far future, the many different flavors of Unix (Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, etc) morphing back together?
Second part of the question, do you think that the different flaovrs "should" morph back together, or continue to grow apart?

Systems research

[asyncster]

In your paper, systems software research is irrelevant, you claim that there is little room for innovation in systems programming, and that all energy is devoted to supporting existing standards. Do you still feel this way now that you're working at Google?

the old school

[Triumph The Insult C]

what modern OS reminds you the most of your old school OS hacking days? what OS do you think keeps closes to the *nix spirit?

One tool for one job?

[sczimme]

Given the nature of current operating systems and applications, do you think the idea of "one tool doing one job well" has been abandoned? If so, do you think a return to this model would help bring some innovation back to software development?

(It's easier to toss a small, single-purpose app and start over than it is to toss a large, feature-laden app and start over.)

Back in The Day

[Greyfox]

Were programmers treated as hot-pluggable resources as they are today? There seems to be a mystique to the programmer prior to about 1995. From reading the various netnews posts and recollections of older programmers, it seems like the programmer back then was viewed as something of a wizard without whom all the computers he was responsible for would immediately collapse. Has anything really changed or was it the same back then as it is now? I'm wondering how much of what I've read is simply nostalgia.

Questions from a disinterested third party..

[SeanTobin]

Mr. Pike, a few questions if you will...

There have been several quotes back in the era of "Big Unix" before the dilution of a certain company's intellectual property. Specifically, one relating to "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes." My first question relates to this quote. To the best of your knowledge, was Unix source or object code ever backed up and transported via this method, possibly through Finland?

What are your feelings on Lucy's younger brother from the Peanuts(TM) cartoon?

Do you feel that the Communist Hippies in Berkley were involved in a mass conspiracy to doctor previously released copies of source code to attempt to dilute the value of the Unix operating system?

And finally, someone were to want to subpoena an individual very much like yourself, where and when would the best place to do so be?

Why does Roblimo think you're a Unix co-creator?

[hruntrung]

Unless I'm very much mistaken, Mr. Pike, you aren't a Unix co-creator. Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson are the co-creators of Unix. If my very quick Google research serves, you joined Bell Labs in 1980 and worked a lot on Plan 9 and the first Bitmap window system for Unix.

So why is Roblimo wrong?

ReiserFS and the future of file systems

[booch]

What do you think of the work Hans Reiser is doing with file systems? How does it differ from and/or improve upon Plan 9? What do you think of his theory that (nearly) all database functions should be done by the file system? What do you think about being able to treat files as directories in order to get to special (or not special) info? Is it useful to be able to treat a tarball as a file when you want to and as a directory when you want to? How about file metadata? Data forks? Do you think Linux, Windows, or Mac OS X will come up with the better database/search-enhanced file system?

Recommended change to BSD's & Linux

[CFrankBernard]

What is your most recommended major programming change to the BSD's and Linux, especially for Theo de Raadt and Linus Travolds...anything from the Plan 9 OS?

Since you now work for Google...

[anonymous cowherd (m]

How can search as a concept become better integrated into the desktop? Are projects like dashboard the next killer app?

Is systems research really dead?

[Xpilot]

After reading your presentation on the death of systems research, I was rather disappointed at the dismal situation presented. Has anything changed since you presented that talk, or have your thoughts changed about the matter? As someone who is interested in systems research, what do you think is the most promising direction that is emerging today?

Why did it take Linux to popularise Open Source?

[RLiegh]

The GNU movement started on old Unix computers, and was aimed in part at them; so why do you think it is that the first wave of unix users were so resistent to the concept of Open Source?

Plan 9/OS insights from Google?

[jwjr]

Do you find any role for Plan9 at Google? Does Linux (or Linux with whatever customizations, extensions, and metamorphoses Google imposes on it) do everything Google needs or wants out of an OS platform? Does your experience with operating systems research pay off directly in contributing to the shape of the Google platform, whether for individual machine OS's, or for co-operation and clustered operation on the network?

Driving force of OS'

[cpfeifer]

What will drive the next crop of OS'? Is it in hardware innovations, new programming languages?

He's NOT a Unix co-creator

[hruntrung]

Jeez, someone, click on the fuckin link in the post with his name. He's not a Unix co-creator. He worked a lot on Plan 9, and wrote a bitmap windowing system for Unix. But he's not a Unix co-creator. The creators of Unix are Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson.

Re:He's NOT a Unix co-creator

[sgant]

Ah, so maybe you should email Roblimo and tell him this since the whole story is:

"Ask Unix Co-Creator Rob Pike"

Set Roblimo straight then...instead of just spouting off in the forums where no one but me will see it.

Article theft

[Zedrick]

The operating systems link goes to encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com, which is a scam-site that steals articles from other sites, in this case from Wikipedia. The only thing they've added are ads. The original can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9

Re:Article theft

[Chalst]

Check out "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Send_in_th e_clones for the general Wikipedia attitude to such sites and the summary on thefreedictionary.com.

In short, thefreedictionary.com is using Wikipedia content more or less as intended, but is using Javascript to bypass the spirit, if not the word of the syndication license, and is in partial violation of the GFDL. As such, it is rated middling amongst violaters of the wikiepdia syndication license. Most wikipedians do not object to syndicated content getting higher rankings, if they are achieved fair and square.

The future of *NIX

[mbonig]

As *NIX and linux become increasingly popular in the business place people are looking to push Microsoft out of the field, replacing servers and workstations with free alternatives like Linux and some BSDs. This is causing kernels and OS designed for server performance to progress to desktop solutions. Do you feel that *NIX should stay in the server marketplace and focus solely on that market, or do you think moving the OS/kernel into a desktop role is "A Good Thing"??

Re:Would use use OO?

[SewersOfRivendell]

I think you mean: Were you to start again today, would you use an object-oriented API instead of a procedural API?

Xanadu, Google, & Plan9

[Anonymous Coward]

Computing has advanced so much in the past ten years that it seems it's impossible to go back and correct any origional mistakes in the way we think about computers. With the amount of money behind the corporate machine, it really seems as if incredible ideas like Plan 9 and Xanadu are now things of the past--once good ideas that could have changed the way we approach computing, that simply missed their time. Do you see hope for these ideas and projects, or any other new or old computing paradigms that have potential for big change, but would require scrapping, say, the past several years of stagnant and unorigional work? -Ryan

Re:Why does Roblimo think you're a Unix co-creator

[AJWM]

He also worked on Version 8 Unix and (IIRC) came up with an early version of the /proc filesystem.

He's certainly a co-creator of what we now know as Unix.

Microkernel vs. Monolithic

[Ransak]

In the marketplace, monolithic OSes seem to be dominating, despite the advantages of microkernel OS design. I know this is straying into many other issues but from your point of view, why are monolithic OSes still viable in the marketplace - and why hasn't the public (ie, the 'programming public') demanded more?

Captain Pike...

[infinite9]

How does it feel driving around in that little buggy only being able to respond to questions with a simple yes or no?

What are you doing...

[Mark Wilkinson]

Google employees are apparently allowed to work on their own projects 20% of the time. Given that you probably can't comment on what you're doing for Google, what are you doing to fill the other 20%?

Re:Why does Roblimo think you're a Unix co-creator

[DylanQuixote]

Wikipedia article about Rob Pike...

The Year 2038 Bug

[WormholeFiend]

End of the World, or not?

If 6 were 9

[not_hylas( )]

Mr. Pike,
I'm a fan of Plan 9 (along with the notion of what it could be), would you give us an idea of some creative uses for this OS.
Be as specific as possible.

Also, if you will, a link for (instructions) porting to Plan 9.

Plan 9 relevancy

[sdcmk]

Do you feel that with the current usage in "traditional" operating systems such as Linux and Windows that there is no place, or need, for a Distributed Operating System in the industry?

The Google Operating System

[andyfaeglasgow]

Can you comment on the speculation about a new Operating System being created by Google?

Many different design strategies

[jd]

Plan 9, from my understanding, is essentially a microkernel with a blend of ideas from Unix and MULTICS. However, it follows the same core concept that most Operating Systems use, which is that the machine has a central processing system, plus devices to which instructions/data should be farmed.

In today's computing environment, this isn't always strictly the case. Multi-CPU boards are becoming more common, and clusters are inexpensive and powerful. Devices are also (returning) to a more "intelligent" state, with higher-end peripherals having comparable computing power to the main processor.

It would seem logical, then, to have a kernel which was more evenly distributed over the system, rather than hogging one specific resource. However, many attempts to do this are crude. Beowulf and MOSIX clusters, for example, run the whole kernel on all the nodes in the cluster, rather than just the bits of the kernel that are actually needed. This eats resources and limits the scalability of such solutions.

Do you have any plans for a distributed Plan 9? And, if so, what would you do differently to the other solutions people have adopted?

Lack of variety in operating systems

[Junks Jerzey]

Most people graduating with computer science degrees are only familiar with Windows and a handful of UNIX-variants: Linux, BSD, OS X. Is it good that stable technology is becoming the standard, thus allowing developers to focus their attentions elsewhere, or was this tremendous reduction in variety premature?

Revolution Needed?

[Anonymous Coward]

When Unix came out, it was written in the highest level language of any operating system: C. Why do you feel that operating systems are still implemented using the oldest, lowest-level languages?

With recent advances in high-level application languages like Java (low-latency garbage collection, dynamic inlining, etc), it seems to me that an operating system based on such a language would offer far more opportinuty for a vastly different kind of operating system more akin to an operating environment. Haven't attempts to add object-oriented features, such as in Plan 9 or to a limited extend Mach, failed due to the choice of implementation language?

It's just painful to see all the disgusting machinations necessary to implement a filesystem, network stack, scheduler, etc in C/C++...

Re:Revolution Needed?

[Empty Threats]

Correction, when UNIX "came out," it was written in the lowest level language of any operating system. Everything else was either written in straight assembly or a sane language, like Lisp or PL/I. Furthermore, Lisp had all those lovely features in 1975.

It's also worth noting that many the problems we have today are based in the concept of the "operating environment" -- today's software and hardware design paradigms are rooted in C. Implementing any language other than Algol-derivatives on top of C certainly fits into the category of "disgusting machinations."

In short, as people have recognized for twenty years or more, UNIX succeeded because it was the lowest common denominator, not because it was any good.

Thoughts on Bell Labs.

[geeber]

Plan 9, Unix and so many other great things came out of Bell Labs. Since the crash of the internet bubble, telecom companies have suffered immensely. One of the results of this is that Lucent has systematically dismantled one of the worlds greatest industrial research facilities. You spent a great part of your career at Bell Labs. What are your thoughts about the history and future (if any) of Bell Labs, and how did the culture of the Labs influence the growth of Unix?

probably redundant by this point...

[Guano_Jim]

emacs or vi?

Silver medal in Archery at the 1980 olympics?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your bio at bell labs and most other bios writen about you, mention that you won the silver medal in archery at the 1980 Olympics.

First, the US and Canada boycotted those olympics.
Second, Boris Isachenko, URS(BLR) won the silver medal at those olympics.

Is this an example of a joke that now has become folklore? Is it a way to "prove" to people that they should check their sources? Or is it just puffing up one's resume?

It seems strange in an era of quick and dirty research that you would still post this on your bio at bell labs. It only took a quick "I'm feeling lucky" google search on "1980 Olympics archery" to pull that info up.

So my question is, why do you keep that on your bio?

Re:Silver medal in Archery at the 1980 olympics?

[Black Acid]

For anyone curious, this is the bio in question, with commentary from http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RobPike:

RobPike wrote the following mostly-serious but slightly tongue-in-cheek bio for his 1994 Usenix paper presentation on Acme: "RobPike, well known for his appearances on ``Late Night with David Letterman'', was also a Member of Technical Staff at BellLabs, where he has been since 1980, the same year he won the Olympic silver medal in Archery. In 1981 he wrote the first bitmap window system for Unix systems, and has since written ten more. With Bart Locanthi he designed the Blit terminal; with BrianKernighan he wrote TheUnixProgrammingEnvironment?. A shuttle mission nearly launched a gamma-ray telescope he designed. He is a Canadian citizen and has never written a program that uses cursor addressing." I believe he did appear at least once on Letterman as assistant to Penn and Teller, but he's joking to say he's well-known for that. The comment about archery is also a joke of some sort; Pike is a Canadian citizen who has worked in the U.S. for decades, and both Canada and the U.S. boycotted the 1980 Olympics, so you needn't go looking for the records of that year's Olympics to figure this out. The rest of his bio appears to be true. He now (2004) works for GoogleSearch.

Bitterness about Linux from older developers

[Junks Jerzey]

Among a certain crowd, Linux is viewed at the savior of computing--a young, hip operating system for the new century. But at the same time, there have been definite twinges of bitterness from a more old-school crowd, including people like Brian Kernighan, Jaron Lanier, and possibly even you. This bitterness appears to stem from the horror of a 25 year old operating system returning to the forefront of computing (for anyone vehemently disagreeing, consider if clones of VMS or OS/360 were suddenly all the rage). Who is right? What's your take?

An old grudge, an new liscense?

[emil]

Two questions:

1. Dave Cutler, mastermind of the Windows NT kernel, once described UNIX as a "junk OS designed by a committee of Ph.D.s.".

   Given two important facts:

   • Windows NT is mostly written in C and C++, both Bell Labs innovations, and
   • IE/Mediaplayer integration has turned the Windows NT codebase into a security disaster

   How would you respond to Cutler's assertions, and how would you rate the code quality of the NT kernel (assuming that you might have perused the recent leaked NT4 source)?

2. While UNIX-like operating systems are growing in popularity, actual Bell Labs code is rarely encountered in free operating systems because of licensing issues (with a few notible exceptions).

   This is a frustrating situation for all of us. Do you see any possibility that major portions of UNIX and Plan 9 source being released under licensing that major distributions would find acceptable?

Please also accept my personal thanks for your work in the field of computer science. The influence of the community of researchers at Bell Labs will be felt for many generations to come.

starting from scratch today?

[Nerkles]

If you were just starting out with today's computers, what would you do differently or the same?

Freeness

[identity0]

How much do you think UNIX's success has been shaped by the relatively light restrictions placed on its use, distribution and modification?

The original UNIX, BSD, and now Linux seem to have been 'freeer' than other OSes of the time, do you think they would have been successful without this?

Finally... vi or Emacs? ; )

Re:Freeness

[identity0]

Oh, and an addendum - Do you think Plan 9, or any other OS with a relatively restrictive license can succeed now against traditional UNIXes and Microsoft?

Hindsight

[stuffduff]

If you had to do it all over again, what would you do differently? Why?

Hardware

[SwansonMarpalum]

Rob, When you were engineering UNIX, processors weren't as beefy, memory was grotesquely expensive, and storage was a premium. These days all of these resources have largely become commodities and can be frittered away wastefully by neglectful programmers. Do you think that in an alternate world where UNIX hadn't been conceived as early in the progression of hardware as 1970, rather had come along at this stage in the timeline where hardware vastly outpaces all but the most glaringly negligent software, it would have been as compact, fast and efficient? Thanks! -Alex R.

More obligatory questions

[sleepingsquirrel]

What operating system to you use the most for your personal and/or work-related needs?

Re:More obligatory questions

[Project2501a]

He is using Plan 9. I saw it in the Plan 9 mailing list somewhere

HURD

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone please put together a good question about The HURD and his views on the project, if I do it, it won't get modded up, I'm bad at expressing myself in english.

Re:Would use use OO?

[generalphilips]

I have to agree that this question does not make sense. It indicates a total lack of understanding of what OO means. I would argue that much of Unix actually is object-oriented. Think, for example, about the concept in Unix of presenting many types of IO devices as files. This achieves encapsulation, polymorphism, and a very high degree of abstraction by hiding implementation details, and presenting a very clean, intuitive inteface to programmers. There are many different types (you might say "classes") of files - pipes, sockets, regular, etc. - all of which can be passed into read and write calls. I'm sure I and others could go on all day about the OO aspects of Unix.

Plan9 advantages over Linux and *BSD

[Florian]

In which areas would you say is Plan9 (still) ahead of Linux/GNU and *BSD, the two operating systems which represent the most contemporary iteration of the original Unix design?

Would you consider Mac OS X a version of Unix?

[the_webmaestro]

What do you think of Mac OS X? Have you used it? Would you consider Mac OS X a 'version' of Unix? Would you consider using it as your main operating system? What do you loave about it? What do you hate about it?

Don't ask this question

[generalphilips]

This is very similar to the another post about OO. Clearly you don't understand OO. There's nothing stopping a C programmer from using OOAD. Language is only incidental. Now I understand that OO languages make OOAD easier, but there's nothing stopping you from using those languages on any platform. If you like Java, well you can develop Java ON UNIX. What exactly is your point about C? C is closer to the metal than most OO languages, which is why OS developers write in C, and many libraries are presented directly to C. But you don't understand the way languages work if you're asking the question, "why C?". Ultimately everything comes down to machine-level instructions, so language is almost completely irrelevant to the OS. Perhaps you mean to ask, "Does the rise of virtual execution environments like Java's or .NET's diminish the importance of the OS?"

Schemas for UNIX

[generalphilips]

Unix suffers today from a proliferation of file and output formats that makes integration between the CLI/config files and the GUI awkward at best. For example, a common idiom for Unix GUI tools is to parse output from a CLI program and present it visually. This would be greatly simplified and much smoother if those programs produced structured output rather than raw text. The same holds for programs that read configuration files, like resolv.conf. Do you think UNIX would benefit from standardization of formats that coalesce around XML? What do you think of the idea of developing schemas for OS objects? What about schemas for common application-level objects - the idea behind WinFS?

I realize the question needs work, but I hope you get the idea.

Power

[schon]

True. CLI is the equivalent of spoken or written language, and the GUI is the equivalent of pointing at something and grunting.

Spoken/written communication is much more powerful (easier, faster, more effective) when both parties understand the language, and the idea is a complex one ("I would like a job at your pie shop.")

Rudimentary communication is easier with point-and-grunt (answering the question "which pie would you like to purchase?" - you point to the one you want)

If the parties don't understand the same language, complex concepts are *much* harder. Learning to communicate by pointing is easier, but the true power of communication comes from spoken/written languages.

Think I'm wrong? Write a detailed response *without* using your keyboard.

Intellectual Property

[lordvdr]

The US (and to some extent, the EU) are facing mounting issues from Software Patents (The idea of patenting an idea opposed to an implementation). What do you think about the current state of Intellectual Property laws?

What limits should be placed on Software Patents? Should they be eliminated entirely? Should all patents be moved to a trademark like system where if they are not enforced, the holder loses the trademark?

What is the fix and what is needed to make it happen? Will it ever be fixed?

Desktop UNIX

[tty21]

Rob, The media and UNIX/Linux boosters have been developing/promoting UNIX variants as a competitor to MS desktop OS's. Are UNIX and it's variants destined to have a significant share of the commercial desktop, or is it a compromise and will always be a small share (but doing most of the work!) OS compared to the star-studded MS lineup? What further steps do OS developers have to take to bring it to every desktop?

If you could write a new OS from scratch

[LWATCDR]

What would it be like. Would it still be unix like?
What would you write it in? I mean if you had the time, money , and a mandate to create the best OS ever and you did not have to care about backward compatability what would you come up with.

Current Interests

[eog]

You have been active in many areas of computer science from computational physics to user environments to operating systems. What are your current interests?

Your Biggest Mistake we're still suffering from?

[bsdnazz]

What's the biggest mistake (design, paradigm, API) you've made that we're still suffering from. And I don't mean leaving the e off creat()!

X11 in the future

[moath]

Do you see X-Windows (in whatever form) as a viable platform for GUI technologies in the future or is it approaching the point of diminishing returns?

Appology to C-Shell users

[stripyd]

Don't you feel you owe an appology to a decade of 80s UNIX novices for wasted hours before discovering you weren't talking about the shell *they* were using in "The UNIX programming environment"?

Not that I'm still bitter 20 years on...

Fess up

[carcosa30]

You stole the source code for UNIX from SCO, didn't cha?

Language based operating systems

[stevedekorte]

Do you see a future for language-based operating systems like the old Smalltalk and LISP machines or the Newton?

Re:Is UNIX worth it?

[jlrobins_uncc]

Well, Rob did something different -- took what they learned from UNIX and wrote something new. And in his eyes, Plan 9 probably has way-fewer warts than POSIX.

I'm surprised this was modded troll. I'm a UNIX user since '92 or thereabouts, and have my FreeBSD 1.0 CD to show for it. Rob is textbook hard core old school, yet he decided to develop something decidedly *different* from UNIX. Therefore, he must have felt that something more radical was warranted than tacking on new substructures to the old warhorse. Cleaner and more interesting solutions were only possible through starting fresh.

Anyway, I was interested in his opinion of if UNIX deserves incremental change and updates, or if it, in his opinion, is ultimately a dead-end -- that our time would be better spent working on something that takes what was good from UNIX yet leaves the bad behind, just as UNIX did to MULTICS.

For example, Plan 9's per-process mount tables are definitely interesting, making more general a concept found in UNIX, but a much bolder change than what one would expect on a UNIX. Similar things can be said of Hurd's abandonment of the 'process running as root has all priviledges' concept. Likewise for languages whose system runtimes perform array bounds checking automatically.

Database filesystems

[defile]

The buzz around filesystems research nowadays is making the UNIX filesystem more database-ish. The buzz around database research nowadays is making the relational database more OOP-ish.

This research to me sounds like the original designers growing tired of the limitations of their "creations" now that they're commodities and going back to the drawing board to "do things right this time". I predict the reinvented versions will never catch on because they'll be too complex and inaccessible.

Of course, this second system syndrome isn't just limited to systems. It happens to bands, directors, probably in every creative art.

I think what we've got in the modern filesystem and RDBMS is about as good as it gets and we should move on. What do you think?

Re:Yes!

[glitchvern]

Gobolinux has directories named after programs and keeps all the program's files in a subdirectory named after the version of the program. Various symbolic link tricks are used to allow programs to see other programs' libraries and such. You can just rm -rf a program directory to remove the program as long as no other program depends on it. They include a script to determine a programs dependencies so running that script over all the programs and grepping the output to see if anything depends on a particular program is pretty easy. You can not move programs around like you can on the Mac because linux programs are not really designed that way. They internally refer to the location of other programs and even themselves in all sorts of ways. The only program I am aware of that can be moved like that is OpenOffice.org. There is another one, but I can not think of it right now.

Redundant Array of Inexpensive CPUs?

[Cardbox]

Mainstream operating systems were designed when electronics were expensive and programs had to treat the computer system as a shared resource. Hence timesharing, multitasking, shared filesystems, and the rest, with all the combinatorial problems of N programs interacting with N other programs.

Now that CPU-plus-memory is so much cheaper, do you see a phase change coming where it is better/more secure/simpler to have one CPU per application? What impact would this have on operating system design?