A Generation Lost in the Bazaar - Poul-Henning Kamp article

Wed Aug 22 14:44:13 UTC 2012

On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 12:03:39AM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> Some hits, some misses.
> 
> "and even the genuine Unix clone Coherent from the paint company Mark
> Williams."
> 
> Not a paint company.  Apparently it was a soft drink company
> (according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Williams_Company).
> 
> I knew two or three good UNIX folks who went to Mark Williams in
> the early days.  One who went on to contribute to Plan-9.
> 
> Autoconf is a disaster in all imaginable ways.

Absolutely.

> "One of Brooks's many excellent points is that quality happens only if
> somebody has the responsibility for it, and that "somebody" can be no
> more than one single person—with an exception for a dynamic
> duo. I am surprised that Brooks does not cite Unix as an example of
> this claim, since we can pinpoint with almost surgical precision the
> moment that Unix started to fragment: in the early 1990s when AT&T
> spun off Unix to commercialize it, thereby robbing it of its
> architects."
> 
> Fragmentation and quality are different things.  Research UNIX was not
> all perfect.  I remember looking at the source for ls(1) in 7th Edition
> and finding it repulsive.  Just try looking at real troff.
> 
> "More than once in recent years, others have reached the same
> conclusion as Brooks. Some have tried to impose a kind of sanity, or
> even to lay down the law formally in the form of technical standards,
> hoping to bring order and structure to the bazaar. So far they have
> all failed spectacularly, because the generation of lost dot-com
> wunderkinder in the bazaar has never seen a cathedral and therefore
> cannot even imagine why you would want one in the first place, much
> less what it should look like."
> 
> That is the natural lament of a BSD person.  BSDers have lived in a
> slow-moving, mostly high-quality cathedral world.  As a result,
> they've been left in the dust.  And left to try to import the cargo
> floating to their little islands from the big neighbouring continent
> (Linux).  If the cathedral had worked, they would not have had to try
> to import those whales.  You cannot have it both ways. [Is that
> enough metaphor hopping for you?]

Well I consider the linux kernel to be a cathedral style work.  Perhaps
ot os a cathedral of cathedrals.  Whatever it is seems to be working
very well.  Can't say that for things like gnome, kde, firefox, etc.

> This is a common pattern.  The new wave has more energy and less class
> than the old wave.
> 
> - I have a friend who thinks the apogee of UNIX was 6th Edition.
>   He lives in Plan-9 now.
> 
> - I have a fondness for 7th edition, but it didn't even have TCP/IP!
> 
> - my cohort lamented the yahoos of BSD.  Now they are the old old^n
>   guard.

It's too bad we are stuck with the networking system BSD invented.
They clearly had completely misunderstood unix (and hence their own OS)
when they came up with that socket system.

> - PC's were crazy/horribly architected but they beat workstations.

Price always wins out it seems.

> - serious system programmers wrote in assembly language when I
>   started.  Later C was a step up, but many lost touch with /
>   understanding of what the machine actually did.  Going to Python
>   makes this worse.  Heck, I actually used machine language for a bit.

Who had a machine with enough ram to even fit a good optimizing compiler?
Of course writing assembly for a machine with 4k is a lot more feasible
than writing assembly for things using 1GB.

> - the old-school classical education was "better" than the current one
>   (my father learned Latin and Greek in school; I took typing
>   instead).  But it was aimed at an elite in a much simpler world.
> 
> - in my generation, a CS degree was a good basis for a career.  (Many
>   of the best programmers were CS drop-outs.)  The generation before
>   were repurposed physicists and the like.  The dot-com boom let in
>   the self-taught, with mixed results (not all bad).  Not all IT pros
>   are programmers in recent years.

Not all bad, just mostly bad.  I do think to be a good IT pro you need
at least some programming knowledge.

> So: nostalgia isn't constructive.  There are lessons to be relearned
> from the past, but we should not try to go there.
> 
> Maybe his article is too short.  autoconf etc. are horrible.  That
> hardly makes the whole of open source a failure.  Dependencies are
> complex and escape casual analysis (he doesn't distinguish
> compile-time and run-time dependencies which make his claims suspect).

The complains about the dependancies certainly indicates a lack
of understanding of how the software works.  If firefox wants
libgraphicswrapper and libgraphicswrapper wants libgif, libpng, libjpeg
and libtiff, then you can either configure libgraphicswrapper to only
support the first three because that's all you think you will ever use
(and certainly all firefox cares about), or you can let it compile libtiff
as well and not libgraphicswrapper is all set for when you want to use
some other program that does want tiff support.  Certainly not the fault
of firefox in any way.

> Both those issues are worth launching crusades over.  I'd join.

Can we add gnu make (make in general as well) and gcc to the list?
Oh and the FSF indentation style too.

> But not the only truth.  Remember: most BSD folks are
> quasi-dissenters.  Semi-orthodox UNIX folks (if they were orthodox,
> they might be using Plan-9).

I have a long list of what is wrong with BSD systems.  I also have a
short list of what they do well.

> "IT professional" is a fluid term.  In my early days, those would
> never touch something as radical as UNIX.  But massive qualitative
> changes happen when most dimensions of IT have changed by orders of
> magnitude (just not individual human intelligence).
> 
> "Poul-Henning Kamp (phk-HZy0K5TPuP5AfugRpC6u6w at public.gmane.org) has programmed computers for 26
> years"
> 
> I've programmed computers of 45 years.
> 
> Elegance in computer science is simplicity.  One early machine I used
> was the PDP-8: 4K words of core memory, each word 12 bits long.  You
> could really master that machine.  But it cannot do much of what I use
> computers for now.
> 
> BTW, the comments on that article on the actual article page are quite
> good.

Well some are.  Better than a typical slashdot article gets for sure.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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