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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.
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 ???
Trolling using another account since 2005.
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?
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
why was the 'e' ever removed from resolv.conf?!!?!?
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.
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!!!
Zed's dead baby. Zed's dead.
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?
Has the Command Line Interface become outdated?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?
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?
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.)
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
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.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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?
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
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?
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
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?
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.
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
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?
"Powers. I have them."
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%?
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++...
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?
Download my free songs!
emacs or vi?
3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
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?
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?
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.
"Give away the stone, let the oceans take and transmutate this cold and faded anchor." - Maynard James Keenan
What operating system to you use the most for your personal and/or work-related needs?
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?
gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
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?
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.
Do you see a future for language-based operating systems like the old Smalltalk and LISP machines or the Newton?