January 09, 2005

UNIX Haters Handbook OK, posting this to get the "loud snap plus excruciating pain" post out of my mind.

To go along with the monkeyfiltered ITBWTCL I would like to offer the not updated AT ALL UNIX Haters Handbook. Now with extra Preface, X-windows disaster and the other bits, available as a PDF download. thanks SideDish; aaargh!

posted by polychrome 19 years ago
  • MoFiTalk: This totally didn't need to have its dontent stuffed into a [More Inside]. On topic: This is pretty funny, but my opinion is that Unix is like capitalism, it's horribly broken but it's the best we've found so far.
  • Why is UNIX so popular you ask? Because, of course, worse is better.
  • I think they posted this to slashdot a couple weeks back. I'm pretty sure, because I read through the entire thing a couple weeks back. :p It's great stuff, it truly is. Only now are we getting versioned filesystems. I would pay cash for a 2nd Edition, brought up to date w/ all the BSDs and all the Linuxes and all the POSIX compliance nonsense and Plan9, and blahblahblah.
  • I read it two or three years ago -- maybe it was a double post?
  • maybe it was a double post?
    Golden!
  • Haha! I still have a copy of this, complete with the supplied Unix barf bag.
  • The UHH dates back to X11R1 for chrissakes. It is probably older than some monkeys here. Very small portions of it are still relevant. The chapter on X, for example, has nothing meaningful to say about modern X installations. Keep in mind that the majority of the 'book advocates LISP-machines. What is a LISP-machine, you ask? Precisely.
  • Yeah, I recall the chapter on X mostly for its motif-hate. Nobody uses motif anymore.
  • Pikachu said: I would pay cash for a 2nd Edition, brought up to date w/ all the BSDs and all the Linuxes and all the POSIX compliance nonsense and Plan9, and blahblahblah. That sounds interesting, though I'd probably try to borrow it from somebody or wait till that too was posted as a PDF. I download my software for free, why would I pay for a book about it? Oh and by the way, is it just me or is Fedora Core 3 a trifle broken?
  • Some think Un*x is bad. Obviously these folks never struggled with VMS or CMS, or any of the other ultra -arcane long-dead OS's that made Un*x look like a walk in the park. Un*x is so good that everybody jumped on board and wrote their own version. Which made it bad.
  • VMS ultra-arcane compared to Unix? Hah. Give me HELP over man any day. VMS in my experience was/is solid and sane, has some lovely features still missing in Unix and Linux (like proper ACLs, automatic file versioning, oodles of compilers for different languages whose object code could all be linked into one executable, clustering), and was far, far better documented than any Unix. The filesystem sucked but was no worse than current NT... Maybe you meant VM or MVS?