Re: [TUHS] The Unix shell: a 50-year view -- feedback wanted

I not only found this paper offensive, but was more offended that ACM would publish something like this and give it an award to boot. I'm planning to send the authors and ACM what's below. Would appreciate any feedback that you could provide to make it better. Thanks, Jon I read your "Unix Shell Programming: The Next 50 Years" expecting some well thought out wisdom from learned experiences. I was sorely disappointed. o The paper never defines what is meant by the term "Unix shell." I think that you're using to mean a command interpreter as described in the POSIX 1003.2 documents. o There is no 50 year old Unix shell. I started using Unix in the early 1970s, and the command interpreter at the time (Ken Thompson's shell) was nothing like later shells such as the Bourne shell (sh since research V7 Unix), Korn shell (ksh), C shell (csh), and the Bourne again shell (bash). The paper is missing any discussion of prior art. In practice, shell implementations either predate the POSIX standard or were built afterwards and include non-standard extensions. o The paper repeats a claim that the shell has been largely ignored by academia and industry. Yet, it does not include any references that support that claim. My own experience and thus opinion is the opposite making the veracity of your claim questionable. As a reader, such unsubstantiated claims make me treat the entire content as suspect. o The paper applies universal complaints such as "unmaintainable" to the shell; it doesn't call out any shell-specific problems. It doesn't explain whether these complaints are against the scripts, the implementation, or both. One of the reasons for the longevity of the sh/bash shells is that experienced practicioners have been able to write easily maintainable code. Scripts written in the 1980s are still around and working fine. o The paper seems to complain that the fact that the shell is documented is a problem. This is an astonishing statement. In my decades as an acting professional, teacher, and author, proper documentation is a key component of being a professional. o The paper is full of non-sequiturs such as discussions about Docker and systemd that have nothing to to with the shell. o The paper has many "nop" statements such as "arguably improved" that don't actually say anything. o Examples, such as the one on page 105 don't work. o Proofreading should have caught things like "improve performance performance" on page 107 among others. o The references contain many more items than the paper actually references. Did you plagerize the bibliography and forget to edit it? o The single result in Figure 1 is insufficient evidence that the approach works on a wide variety of problems. o The paper makes it appear that the authors don't actually understand the semantics of the original Bourne shell. Not just my opinion; I received an email from Steve Bourne after he read your paper, and I consider him to be a subject matter expert. The paper is lacking the generally accepted form of: o What problem are you trying to solve? o What have others done? o What's our approach? o How does it do? Filtering out all of the jargon added for buzzword compliance, I think that the paper is really trying to say: o Programmable command interpreters such as those found in Unix-based systems have been around for a long time. For this paper, we're focusing on the GNU bash implementation of the POSIX P1003.2 shell. Other command interpreters predate Unix. o This implementation is used more often than many other scripting languages because it is available and often installed as the default command interpreter on most modern systems (Unix-based or otherwise). In particular, it is often the default for Linux systems. o The shell as defined above is being used in ways that are far more complex than originally contemplated when Bourne created the original syntax and semantics, much less the new features added by the POSIX standards committee. The combination of both the POSIX and bash extensions to the Bourne shell exposes a new set of limitations and issues such as performance. o While much work has been done by the bash implementors, it's primarily been in the area of expanding the functionality, usually in a backward-compatible manner. Other shells such as the original ksh and later ash and zsh were implemented with an eye towards the performance of the internals and user perspectives. o Performance optimization using modern techniques such as JIT have been applied to other languages but not to POSIX shell implementations. This paper looks at doing that. It is unsurprising that techniques that have worked elsewhere work here too. o It's hard to imagine that the application of this technique is all that's required for a 50-year life extension. The title of this paper implies that it's going to be comprehensive rather than just being a shameless plus for an author's project. Of course, this doesn't make much of a paper. Guessing that that's why it was so "bulked up" with irrelevancies. It appears that all of you are in academia. I can't imagine that a paper like this would pass muster in front of any thesis committee, much less get that far. Not only for content, but for lack of proofreading and editing. The fact that the ACM would publish such a paper eliminates any regret that I may have had in dropping my ACM membership.