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Comment by tapan_k | Hacker News Reader

Here's one from the book The Art of UNIX Programming[0]: "The Unix philosophy is bottom-up and not top-down. It is pragmatic and grounded in experience."

[0] http://www.amazon.com/UNIX-Programming-Addison-Wesley-Profes...

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That book - TAOUP - is quite good, though written in ESR's typical style (somewhat heavy and maybe overuse of relatively complex and less-used words).

One concept or principle mentioned in the book - the X Windows concept - of "provide mechanism, not policy" [1] - is, IMO, one of the reasons for Unix's longevity and success, even as it has morphed through various versions - from the original Bell Labs ones through Sun, HP, IBM's versions, and then Linux, the BSDs, etc., and up to Android and Mac OS X and iOS. I commented somewhere recently on a blog post about this.

[1] To make it clear, the principle name is slightly misleading. It does not mean "don't provide at all". It just means, let the lower layers of a software stack (such as X Windows) provide only the mechanism, and leave it to higher layers (such as, say, KDE or GNOME), to decide the policy.

Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_mechanism_and_po...

Predating those two are:

UNIX as literature http://theody.net/elements.html

Life with UNIX by Don Libes http://minnie.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/Books/Life_with... (from the author's website)

I'm only part way through the 1st chapter but the Don Libes book is quite good. Having been written in 1989 it's an interesting perspective of Unix before Linux.

Thanks for sharing!

Started reading the Don Libes book, good stuff, brings back memories of my Unix work / days; thanks for sharing.

> "The Unix philosophy is bottom-up and not top-down. It is pragmatic and grounded in experience."

Something that seems to be lost on a solid portion of the current custodians of that legacy...

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