All, I got this e-mail and thought many of you would appreciate the link.
Cheers, Warren
----- Forwarded message from Poul-Henning Kamp -----
I stumbled over this:
https://www.telecomarchive.com/lettermemo.html
is the TUHS crew aware of that resource ?
----- End forwarded message -----
I'm wondering if there are places where people who were in the Unix
Room wrote about the origins and evolution of what people (at least
used to(*)) refer to as "Unix Philosophy", and since some are in THIS
(TUHS) room, what they might have to say about it.
How much was in reaction to the complexity of Multics, and how much
was simply a response to the limited address spaces of
available and affordable hardware?
Eric S. Raymond wrote in "The Art of Unix Programming" quoting
Doug McIlroy and Rob Pike:
http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html
And I wonder if they care to comment on it?
I have trouble taking ESR as authoritative, as, it seems to me that
Research Unix was more a product of the "Cathedral" (or at least a
contained community) than the "Bazaar" (at least the modern bazaar,
where everyone needs to leave a new feature grafito on the town
walls), and ESR
A side question for Rob Pike, is the "Not only is UNIX dead, it's
starting to smell really bad." quote accurate? Was it in reaction to
BSD, GNU, or all of the above?
(*) I say "used to", because, for the most part, minimalism seems to
have left the building. I can't look at modern GNU utilities, and
many, if not most open source packages and think they've gone WAY past
classic Unix minimalism, especially since I remember hearing that Bell
Research had happily stripped excess features (removal of "cat -s"
sticks in my mind) from later day research Unix, and because Stallman
is said to have coined the term "New Jersey" style as a synonym for
what Richard P. Gabriel called "Worse is Better", which seems, an
attack on minimalism (nothing less than "the right thing" is acceptable)
Worse is.... readings:
https://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.htmlhttps://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.htmlhttps://dreamsongs.com/Files/IsWorseReallyBetter.pdfhttps://dreamsongs.com/Files/worse-is-worse.pdf
Anti-flamage disclainmers:
Inclusion of links above does not imply any agreement on my part! My
apologies in advance for any offense, misquote, or misunderstanding on
my part.
