Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Ah, this is entertaining to contrast with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15031814 "Why did software go off the rails". The "UNIX haters handbook" is extremely old, as if you couldn't tell from the references to Reagan and the 50-MIPS workstation (roughly equivalent to a $1 Cortex-M0 in today's money).

And in many ways they're not wrong:

- "X has defeated us by switching the meaning of client and server"

- "most computers running X run just four programs: xterm, xload, xclock, and a window manager" : the intervening 20 years have added a web browser. Almost all software run by the user is in either the xterm or the browser.

- ICCCM is hilariously complicated, although cut-and-paste largely works now. It's just that there are two different cut-and-paste mechanisms in play.

- client/server division of labour is still being fought over on the web

- X authentication is painful to do with the original mechanism, but was eventually fixed by ssh X forwarding

- Xdefaults is a great mystery, largely obsoleted by the GNOME people with their own mysterious pseudo-registries and, god help you, polkit

- X still has trouble with the wide variety of graphics hardware out there, although you can usually get 2 monitors working eventually.

- "NeWS an d NEXTSTEP were political failures because they suffer from the same two problems: oBNoXiOuS capitalization, and Amiga Persecution Attitude(TM)." : basically true, until they dropped the attitude and capitals and became Cocoa.

> - "X has defeated us by switching the meaning of client and server"

If you think in terms of network programming, "server" is the program that accepts incoming connections and handles requests from clients, and "client" is the program that initiates the connection and sends requests, it is not confusing at all.

The security part is true, though. X authentication sucks, and using ssh might make that usable (plus, encryption), but that is kind of like saying that eMail is not a secure communication channel, but PGP solved that.

But there is no alternative that solves the problems with X while keeping or improving upon its strengths (that I know of, I should add):

The "mechanism not policy" part is the reason it is possible to choose from several desktop environments.

Also, X has achieved something that no other current windowing environment can do: Transparent, cross-platform windowing. There are X servers available for all the free Unices, macOS, Windows, and once upon a time, I am told, for OpenVMS, too.

Indeed, X liberated us from expecting workstations to only be clients and servers to be some big iron where I go to get service. What X began, lightbulbs (with embedded servers) are now completing.

That and FTP. FTP Passive mode used to be an optional extension.

This has always struck me as an odd decision.

I am not an authority on designing network protocols by any standard, first using two separate connections for commands and data seems strange enough to begin with (at least to me). But I cannot imagine what possible reason the people who designed the protocol had.

To be clear, I am not certain if I would have done a better job.

Either way, I was very happy when I discovered sftp. :)

Separate control and data channels is quite a .. "telco" design. Also present in the much more recent SIP protocol.

Do remember that FTP is very, very old. It's from 1971.

FTP always seemed to me to be a design that was never fully implemented. There's a hint that downloads should run in the background and in parallel while you look around the directories, but FTP clients and servers for a very long time were stubbornly single threaded.

One also has the impression that FTP was supposed to be integrated into your shell and avoid the clunky client entirely, but the design wasn't quite there to support it, so we got the worst of both worlds. A funky network protocol that ran into a lot of trouble when firewalls and NAT appeared and a primitive placeholder client that only downloads a single file at a time.

The Unix Haters Handbook may be old, but it's a glorious combination of humor and legitimate commentary. I read it years ago while on a vacation, and I don't think I've ever laughed as much while reading any other book, ever.

Here's a link to the book in its full glory:

http://simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf

I reread UHH recently, and I don't find it has aged well. The humor is very dated, as is much of the commentary. I was keeping notes reading through it about what was no longer correct or relevant, but it became sort of pointless when the notes were, "This whole chapter is wrong, and so is the next. Who even has heard of csh at this point?" It definitely has its place in the hacker canon, but I'm not sure I could wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who doesn't remember the computing scene back then.

It also ignited debate over what it was even called. Is it the "X-Window System", or abbreviated, "X-Window" or, like the British and their "maths", is it "X-Windows"? Not to be confused with "Windows®" of course.

I think the US is the odd one out hete with your one unit of 'math'.

Mathematics -> maths

You don't say, "I am learning mathematic", unless you are a cretin.

It has an 's' at the end, but it is still treated as a singular noun in most contexts. You don't say "My favorite subjects are mathematics", you say "My favorite subject is mathematics".

To be fair, you would also not say “My favorite subjects are games”; there’s only one subject, called “games”, even though the word “games” is a plural form of “game”.

I can’t really come up with a situation where you would want to refer to multiple “mathematicses”; it kind of just is something ethereal, not a _thing_ where it makes sense to refer to one or many.

Hypothetical_Bob: "I like applied and pure maths. Mathss are my favourite subjects. I don't know which one to pick for my A levels".

Most people abbreviate "economics" as "econ" why not "mathematics" as "math"?

This is the wrong place for this debate, but "math" is an abbreviation of "mathematics". Why would you take the end of a word you are abbreviating and add it to your abbreviation? I'll add that "mathematics" is a singular noun.

All of mathematics is connected at the root, so there is only one math.

I've long preferred "math's", which was actually in common use at some point in the 19th century. It's a contraction, like "bo's'n" :-).

> You don't say, "I am learning mathematic", unless you are a cretin.

So why is "maths" plural? It's sure as hell not countable. What is "a math"?

At least "mathematic" makes sense—you can deconstruct the morphology to understand this is "a lesson", i.e. the gerund of "to learn". It's also the natural english adjectival form of the greek word.

"maths" is just weird. You might as well use "magicks".

Is this even a debate? Wikipedia makes it clear that it is called "The X Window System", or "X" for short.

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

Teach The Controversy [TM] !!!

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Teach_the_controversy

It was not a debate really, it was a popular error that was much remarked upon. It was as much of a shibboleth then as people saying "SystemD" now is.

>To annoy X fanatics, Don specifically asked that we include the hyphen after the letter "X,", as well as the plural of the word "Windows," in his chapter title.

Of course :-)

"like the British and their "maths""

You should see my mathematic 8)

> "most computers running X run just four programs: xterm, xload, xclock, and a window manager" : the intervening 20 years have added a web browser. Almost all software run by the user is in either the xterm or the browser.

Don't forget random enterprise software installers that insist on a graphical mode even though they could never successfully be operated by someone who isn't comfortable on the command line

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