Re: The Unix Haters Handbook
- From: donnie <donnie@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2006 23:09:47 GMT
On Sun, 05 Mar 2006 06:41:02 -0000, Grant Edwards <grante@xxxxxxxx>
wrote:
I've been happily using Unix for 25+ years, but I still think######################################
the Unix Haters Handbook is hilarious. I had tears running
down my face reading the section on X11.
That's exactly why I mentioned it in the first place, the humor.
Obviously, I use Unix myself, otherwise I wouldn't have asked about
improving my fiber connection to FreeBSD. I was surprised when they
said that Unix was supposed to have been april fool's joke. Here's an
excerpt.
In an announcement that has stunned the computer industry, Ken
Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Brian Kernighan admitted that the Unix
operating system and C programming language created by them is an
elaborate April Fools prank kept alive for more than 20 years.
Speaking at the recent UnixWorld Software Development Forum, Thompson
revealed the following: In 1969, AT&T had just terminated their work
with the GE/AT&T Multics project. Brian and I had just started working
with an early release of Pascal from Professor Nichlaus Wirth?s ETH
labs in Switzerland, and we were impressed with its elegant simplicity
and power. Dennis had just finished reading Bored of the Rings, a
hilarious National Lampoon parody of the great Tolkien Lord of the
Rings trilogy. As a lark, we decided to do parodies of the Multics
environment and Pascal. Dennis and I were responsible for the
operating environment. We looked at Multics and designed the new
system to be as complex and cryptic as possible to maximize casual
users? frustration levels, calling it Unix as a parody of Multics, as
well as other more risque allusions.Then Dennis and Brian worked on a
truly warped version of Pascal, called A. When we found others were
actually trying to create real programs with A, we quickly added
additional cryptic features and evolved into B, BCPL, and finally C.
We stopped when we got a clean compile on the following syntax:
for(;P("\n"),R=;P("|"))for(e=C;e=P("_"+(*u++/
8)%2))P("|"+(*u/4)%2);
To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that
allowed such a statement was beyond our comprehension! We actually
thought of selling this to the Soviets to set their computer science
progress back 20 or more years. Imagine our surprise when AT&T
and other U.S. corporations actually began trying to use Unix and C!
It has taken them 20 years to develop enough expertise to generate
even marginally useful applications using this 1960s technological
parody, but we are impressed with the tenacity (if not common sense)
of the general Unix and C programmer. In any event, Brian, Dennis, and
I have been working exclusively in Lisp on the Apple Macintosh for the
past few years and feel really guilty about the chaos, confusion, and
truly bad programming that has resulted from our silly prank so long
ago.
.
- References:
- The Unix Haters Handbook
- From: donnie
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