[TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 32, Issue 8

[TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 32, Issue 8

[Larry McVoy]

> There's a reason Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson have been awarded  
> the U.S. National Medal of Technology (1998) and are fellows of the  
> Computer History Museum Online. Dave Cutler hasn't and isn't.
> "You are not expected to understand this."

And while I think this is a little unfair to Dave that's a great .sig

It goes well with the recent post about Unix vs NT that concluded about 
NT "there is no there there".  I live on both platforms and I couldn't
agree more.

Some day I'll post my view on this but here is the really short summary.
There are two classes of people: those who derive answers and those who
memorize them.  As Mark Twain said, the latter group is much larger than
the former.  My claim is that Unix appeals to the first group - you can 
guess what it is going to do and you'll be right most of the time.
Windows appeals to the other group.  They don't have the ability to derive
any answer and they are comfortable with a system that mostly works but
has "no there there".  They can't tell the difference.

The sad part (and the good part!) is that all of us on this list are
in the former group which is smaller.  I think we (well, many of us)
wish that more people thought like we do and figured stuff out for
themselves but the reality is that most people aren't inclined to do that.
So the good and bad part is that we're a small select group.  Personally,
I've come to accept that and like it.  I've gotten to the point where I
realize that people who can derive the answer are special, they are gift,
and I consider myself lucky when I run into a concentrated group of them.
Cough, cough, that would be you.  :)
-- 
---
Larry McVoy                lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitkeeper.com

[TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 32, Issue 8

[John Cowan]

Larry McVoy scripsit:

> There are two classes of people: those who derive answers and those who
> memorize them.  As Mark Twain said, the latter group is much larger than
> the former.  My claim is that Unix appeals to the first group - you can 
> guess what it is going to do and you'll be right most of the time.
> Windows appeals to the other group.  They don't have the ability to derive
> any answer and they are comfortable with a system that mostly works but
> has "no there there".  They can't tell the difference.

'Sfunny, but it seems just the other way about to me.  Unix, especially
Olde Worlde Unix, is all about memorizing stuff.  Creat(2) has no final e.
The option to set the field delimiter is -t, except in cut(1) where it's
-d and in awk(1) where it's -F.  You dump a file to standard output with
cat(1); yeah, you can remember the name if you learn the word "catenate",
but most of us don't know that word, and it's no easier to memorize
"catenate" than "cat" (more fun, but no easier).  We all find all this
very natural, it ripples off our fingers because we've been doing it
for 10 or 20 or 30 or nearly 40 years, and none of the inconsistencies
can be fixed because if they were it would break all of our muscle
memory and then it wouldn't be so easy at all.

Windows folks can't deal with all that memorization.  They want it
laid out for them: menus dialogs wizards with tabs that make all the
options visible, or if not all visible at once, at least easy to see
how you can make them visible.  And all consistent, or reasonably
so.  With Windows programs you really can guess what they re going
to do, and you will be right most of the time.  Unix utilities aren't
like that.  Even X programs aren't -- indeed, less so than the utilities,
unless they use a Windows-mimicking toolkit, which most of them do
nowadays.

No, what makes Unixicians sont droit et Windowsites sont tort
is that Unix lets you make up your own stuff out of existing pieces,
and Windows does not.  The Windows utilities just do what they do, and
if it's not what you want, it's back to the drawing board, so people
create TMA-1 monoliths.  This tendency is infecting Unix too nowadays,
as lots of people have discovered how much easier it is to create
TMA-1s on Unix than on Windows, and so they do, and the native tradition
of coarse-grained dataflow gets almost lost against the background
surviving only in the memories of the Old Farts here gathered.

Our tradition's dying unless we do something to keep it alive.
What's that going to be?

-- 
I don't know half of you half as well           John Cowan
as I should like, and I like less than half     cowan at ccil.org
of you half as well as you deserve.             http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
        --Bilbo

[TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 32, Issue 8

[Evan de Riel]

On 10 Jun, 2006, at 00:40, John Cowan wrote:

> ...
>
> No, what makes Unixicians sont droit et Windowsites sont tort
> is that Unix lets you make up your own stuff out of existing pieces,
> and Windows does not.  The Windows utilities just do what they do, and
> if it's not what you want, it's back to the drawing board, so people
> create TMA-1 monoliths.  This tendency is infecting Unix too nowadays,
> as lots of people have discovered how much easier it is to create
> TMA-1s on Unix than on Windows, and so they do, and the native  
> tradition
> of coarse-grained dataflow gets almost lost against the background
> surviving only in the memories of the Old Farts here gathered.
>
> Our tradition's dying unless we do something to keep it alive.
> What's that going to be?

As ashamed as I am to admit it, I do read slashdot on occasion, and  
on one such occasion I saw that there was an interview with Rob Pike 
[1]; Mr Pike's comments weren't one and all insightful, but his  
answer the to question about whether "Unix style" was still a valid  
development aesthetic started me thinking (I've haven't stopped yet,  
so I don't yet know if I agree):

Q:  ... do you think the idea of "one tool doing one job" has been  
abandoned? ...
A:  Those days are dead and gone and the eulogy was delivered by Perl.

I think his point is that what Perl and its friends--the other high- 
level, interpreter languages like Python, Ruby, and maybe (ick) PHP-- 
have gotten to the point where they can be used as a single framework  
for writing short, ad-hoc programs in these languages that replace  
combinations of the whole mess of Unix utilities like grep, cat, sed,  
awk, uniq, sort, column, rs, head, tail, and maybe even more complex  
tools like wget or hexdumps.

It's certainly more typing to write a perl function that can do the  
work of one of these utilities, but on the other hand one has to  
worry substantially less about syntax options for dozens different  
commands, remembering enough escape sequences for nested for loops,  
etc.  Instead of making many programs that each do one thing well, we  
have a language and a framework designed to do *anything*, and handle  
it well (or at least satisfactorily).  And isn't being able to do  
anything you tell it to do with equal facility one of the great  
things about computers?

[1]: http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/18/1153211

Yours,

Evan

[TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 32, Issue 8

[John Cowan]

Evan de Riel scripsit:

> Q:  ... do you think the idea of "one tool doing one job" has been  
> abandoned? ...
> A:  Those days are dead and gone and the eulogy was delivered by Perl.
> 
> I think his point is that what Perl and its friends--the other high- 
> level, interpreter languages like Python, Ruby, and maybe (ick) PHP-- 
> have gotten to the point where they can be used as a single framework  
> for writing short, ad-hoc programs in these languages that replace  
> combinations of the whole mess of Unix utilities like grep, cat, sed,  
> awk, uniq, sort, column, rs, head, tail, and maybe even more complex  
> tools like wget or hexdumps.

Well, I don't have a problem with replacing the shell-and-utilities
framework with a more consistent one.  The trouble is that the essential
idea of that framework, what I called "coarse-grained dataflow"
in the last posting, and which has been called "plumbing" since the
earliest days, gets lost in the process.  Perl-level programming is only
incrementally better than C-level (admittedly the increments are good
ones, like garbage collection and simple strings and dynamic typing).

The only consistent framework I know of that preserves plumbing as a
functional programming approach is scsh <http://www.scsh.net/>, and much
as I love Scheme personally, it's just too alien to mainstream ways of
thinking to have a real chance of survival as anything but a niche of
a niche.

What I'd really like to see is something that merges Lua and rc(1), a
lightweight but powerful language with a lightweight but powerful shell,
in a clean way.  I even messed around with constructing a unified Yacc
grammar to use them jointly, with the notion that a top-end parser could
compile the hybrid into pure Lua using a Posix library.  But I got bogged
down and never went back there.

Lua might be *too* lightweight, though:  Python comes with a big library
of useful stuff, is a fair approximation to Lisp (as Lua is also), and
could perhaps be transmogrified into a shell somehow, given how dynamic
everything in Python is (even the variable and function declarations
are really executable statements).  I'll think on it further.

-- 
Barry gules and argent of seven and six,        John Cowan
on a canton azure fifty molets of the second.   cowan at ccil.org
        --blazoning the U.S. flag               http://www.ccil.org/~cowan

[TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 32, Issue 8

[Jose R. Valverde]

That is a bit self-complacent.

I for one would *love* to believe it. The truth is it isn't true. See,
what happens is that besides the odd Leonardo or Erasmus, most of us
have a limited brain with a limited ability to cope with the Real World.

As a result we all must take decisions about what we do, learn, master
or relay to others to do for us. Everyday more so. This implies we
learn something well and just the basics (if anything) of all the rest,
relying on others to do the work for us.

Most Windows users started as people who needed an easy way to do an odd
job efficiently. For the odd job, it is by far orders of magnitude more
efficient to point and click than learning a new language.

A professional user needs to learn the tools and language of the trade
and abhors the Windows way. That's why if you look around, you'll discover
windows power users programming spreadhseets, wirting macros, etc...

So, why Windows? Because computers are a recent addition to our home
life (see, UNIX and UNIX-like systems where unattainable till mid-90s)
and Microsoft is very successfult at equating OS with Windows (see,
they have a quasi-monopoly), and all of us are frightened in front of
change and novelties (since we were slime molds).

The average user starts on Windows because it is easier to point and
click once a month than learning a new language. When they become pro's
they see the shortcoming but it's easier to use VisualBASIC than jumping
ships.

When the average user starts on *X with CDE/KDE/Gnome/whatever and then
needs to become pro and learn the language, they find a friendlier system
underneath. If only they could share their work with the 90% of their
colleagues who use windows instead of UNIX/Linux/Mac... But then MS
wouldn't keep a monopoly, would they? Guess where all their PR is going
to be invested ;-)

Don't blame the users, they are doing as best they can with whatever it
is they have at hand (even if it is Windows) and we should be really
astonished at their tenacious efforts to get things done.

				j


On Fri, 9 Jun 2006 20:58:04 -0700
lm at bitmover.com (Larry McVoy) wrote:
> > There's a reason Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson have been awarded  
> > the U.S. National Medal of Technology (1998) and are fellows of the  
> > Computer History Museum Online. Dave Cutler hasn't and isn't.
> > "You are not expected to understand this."
> 
> And while I think this is a little unfair to Dave that's a great .sig
> 
> It goes well with the recent post about Unix vs NT that concluded about 
> NT "there is no there there".  I live on both platforms and I couldn't
> agree more.
> 
> Some day I'll post my view on this but here is the really short summary.
> There are two classes of people: those who derive answers and those who
> memorize them.  As Mark Twain said, the latter group is much larger than
> the former.  My claim is that Unix appeals to the first group - you can 
> guess what it is going to do and you'll be right most of the time.
> Windows appeals to the other group.  They don't have the ability to derive
> any answer and they are comfortable with a system that mostly works but
> has "no there there".  They can't tell the difference.
> 
> The sad part (and the good part!) is that all of us on this list are
> in the former group which is smaller.  I think we (well, many of us)
> wish that more people thought like we do and figured stuff out for
> themselves but the reality is that most people aren't inclined to do that.
> So the good and bad part is that we're a small select group.  Personally,
> I've come to accept that and like it.  I've gotten to the point where I
> realize that people who can derive the answer are special, they are gift,
> and I consider myself lucky when I run into a concentrated group of them.
> Cough, cough, that would be you.  :)
> -- 
> ---
> Larry McVoy                lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitkeeper.com
> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
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[TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 32, Issue 8

[Larry McVoy]

A somewhat different view on the Starbucks story:

A friend of mine moved here from New Mexico (which is a fantastic place to
live, amazing, I used to live there) and she said "It's unbelievable - you
can watch people and realize that they are actually thinking before they
are talking".

Indeed.  I'd rather be in the midst of rude people thinking than any sort
of people not thinking.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy                lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitkeeper.com