Unix – The Hole Hawg of Operating Systems (1999)

I wasn't raised like a contractor's son so I didn't grow with the Hole Hawg. However, working in the financial mines of the bank kingdoms in my youth, I discovered Unix. It lived in grey boxes and spoke in grunts like cd and pwd in black windows. It didn't have shiny buttons and easy-grip handles and didn't like to dialog box. It worked tirelessly in the cold rooms of the machines. Legend had it that you could depend on it if your life depended on it. Most people didn't go in those rooms. Some who went only did enough to get the job done. But I felt different. I thought once you opened its shell, there was a lot that it could say and lot one could learn. I found an old book containing its language and started to say the words to see if that worked. And it did. It spoke in the most beautiful 80-column voice and answered only what you needed and no more. We communicated and our chats grew longer - almost like scripts in a play.

Decades have passed and it has gone beyond the cold rooms to our warm pockets. It still works tirelessly. You can still depend on it. It has changed its shape and wears colours if you want it to. But deep down, I know it to have the same kernel of truth. If you want to talk to it in those ancient grunts, it will still answer back. And that to me still is the most beautiful language.

Since every top-level comment thus far seems to disagree with the Hole Hawg comparison, I will provide an agreement.

My very first programming experience was the integrated shell of Python 2.6, maybe 2.7. I followed wikis and tutorials in order to print various fun little things. Everything past that was further layers of abstraction, buttons, magic, and GUIs.

I was whisked away into the faintly surreal and inexplicable tornado of Android Studio and XCode until my first year of college, at which point a college professor, during the third lecture of class, was asked, "how many students fail out during this course?"

The professor paused for a moment, and said, "I'm not sure -- let me count the number of failing grades from last semester's final," at which point he piped his grade book into a terminal, straight into a series of bash commands that gave him the precise number of final exams that had scored below a 55.

Thinking back, it's not the fact that he could do that -- I sort of knew that was possible, even with a fairly basic understanding of computers. It was the ease, the fluency with which he did it.

Right then, I understood that programming was the closest I was ever going to get to my childhood understanding of alchemy/magic/psionic powers. And maybe even a little bit further than that.

That is what Unix will always mean to me. A genuine, actual, factual spellbook, inexplicably and suddenly laid at my feet.

This is a chapter from "In the Beginning... Was the Command Line" (1999)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Co...

UNIX seems, historically, to focus on utility. There are lockable doors but you get the keys. It becomes your choice to manage your machine(s) at whatever level you need to. Critical utilities and management can almost always be automated because of the philosophy of having a CLI which can be made to work without user interaction and because devices and critical parts of the system are exposed to scripting languages (/proc /dev etc).

Such a philosophy makes it impossible to create a truly easy-to-use system because the "OS" cannot make assumptions about its state. e.g. you have a configuration file and the root user can edit it with a text editor and introduce inconsistencies.

So either you don't allow the user to introduce "not anticipated" states or you let them and on their head be it. That seems to me to be the main UNIX philosophy - "ultimately the choice is yours".

That doesn't mean you can't screw it up and make it something else. I think the corporate interests who are paying for the development of Linux have made choices that have moved it a few steps away. Thanks to open source, however, one can escape their clutches for a price.

Soso. I thinks Dennis Ritchie put it better. Also, if I see non IX OS like Haiku OS, as impressive as they are, in the end I am missing the underlying IX Philosophy and power.

Anti-Foreword By Dennis Ritchie for the Linux Hater Handbook https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

To the contributers to this book: I have succumbed to the temptation you offered in your preface: I do write you off as envious malcontents and romantic keepers of memories. The systems you remember so fondly (TOPS-20, ITS, Multics, Lisp Machine, Cedar/Mesa, the Dorado) are not just out to pasture, they are fertilizing it from below.

Your judgments are not keen, they are intoxicated by metaphor. In the Preface you suffer first from heat, lice, and malnourishment, then become prisoners in a Gulag. In Chapter 1 you are in turn infected by a virus, racked by drug addiction, and addled by puffiness of the genome. Yet your prison without coherent design continues to imprison you.

How can this be, if it has no strong places? The rational prisoner exploits the weak places, creates order from chaos: instead, collectives like the FSF vindicate their jailers by building cells almost compatible with the existing ones, albeit with more features. The journalist with three undergraduate degrees from MIT, the researcher at Microsoft, and the senior scientist at Apple might volunteer a few words about the regulations of the prisons to which they have been transferred.

Your sense of the possible is in no sense pure: sometimes you want the same thing you have, but wish you had done it yourselves; other times you want something different, but can't seem to get people to use it; sometimes one wonders why you just don't shut up and tell people to buy a PC with Windows or a Mac. No Gulag or lice, just a future whose intellectual tone and interaction style is set by Sonic the Hedgehog. You claim to seek progress, but you succeed mainly in whining.

Here is my metaphor: your book is a pudding stuffed with apposite observations, many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain life for some. But it is not a tasty pie: it reeks too much of contempt and of envy.

Bon appetit!

I'm not sure this analogy is on point. A professional carpenter would use a drill that was suitable for the job, and not pull out that contraption for everything. Certainly there are way better drills for versatility if you were only allowed one.

One past little thread:

Unix - The Hole Hawg - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2174519 - Feb 2011 (5 comments)

Unix is a bit more general purpose than a hole hawg, which is used by electricians, plumbers, and LV cable installers, almost exclusively for creating penetrations in studs for pipe and wire to pass through. Some electricians use it to drill knockouts into electrical enclosures and I suppose you could use it to spin a paint mixer or concrete mixer, but it has a pretty specific application in mind.

I agree, Unix/Linux is like a Hole Hawg, it puts the full power of the processor and the resources it's hooked to into what ever drill bit (program) you care to use.

Like a hole hawg, that power can rapidly cause things to go awry. Unlike a hole hawg, the extent of the damage can extend across the world.

I feel like, modern extensions of the Microsoft command line excluded, I use Linux for one thing and windows for another. I've yet to have a windowing environment that simply works like windows does in Linux. The same is true for my experience in the terminal but visa versa. Different tools for different jobs. But, it's 2021 not 1999. Maybe times were different then.

Inline with other comments here, I think that Mr Stephenson missed the point.

*nix operating systems were and continue to be successful because they are a complete and powerful toolbox for computing at all different levels.

And yes, if I had to identify a "Hole Hawg" of Unix it would probably be the `dd' command. But I certainly don't use it on a daily basis :)

this article is really old and I think UNIX and links are not just for huge construction Before the current company that I'm working with (they forced me to use mac for day to day jobs, we can call this Unix as well but I don't like it), I used to use Linux for everything. Literally everything. My da is old but even he is comfortable with Linux distributions... But I liked the way this Author described Unix

> Pre-Hole Hawg, I used to examine the drill selection in hardware stores with what I thought was a judicious eye, scorning the smaller low-end models and hefting the big expensive ones appreciatively, wishing I could afford one of them babies. Now I view them all with such contempt that I do not even consider them to be real drills--merely scaled-up toys designed to exploit the self-delusional tendencies of soft-handed homeowners who want to believe that they have purchased an actual tool.

killshot. this is what unix is like.

C language is the Hole Hawg, IMO. UNIX is just the hole(s).

OK, fine, so let's go with it.

Since my impression is that HN people are [a] xNix fans [b] often quite young therefore [c] have little exposure to other OSes, let me try to unpack what Stephenson was getting at, *in context*.

The Hole Hawg is a dangerous and overpowered tool for most non-professionals. It is big and heavy. It can take on big tough jobs with ease, but its size and its brute power mean that it is not suitable for precision work. It has relatively few safety features, so that if used inexpertly, it will hurt its operator.

DIY stores are full of smaller, much less powerful tools. This is for good reasons:

• because for non-professional users, those smaller, less-powerful tools are much safer. A company which sells a tool to untrained users which tends to maim or kill them will go out of business.

• because smaller, less-powerful tools are better for smaller jobs, that a non-professional might undertake, such as hanging a picture, or putting up some shelves.

• professionals know to use the right tool for the job. Surgeons do not operate with chainsaws. Carpenters do not use axes.

The Hole Hawg, as described, is a clumsy tool that needs things attached to it in order to be used, and even then, you need to know the right way or it will hurt you.

Compare with a domestic drill with a pistol grip that is ready to use out of its case. Modern ones are cordless, increasing their convenience.

One is a tool for someone building a house; the other is a _better_ tool for someone _living in that house._

That's the drill part.

Now, let's discuss the OSes talked about in the rest of the 1999 piece from which that's a clipping: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Co...

There are:

• Linux, before KDE, with no free complete desktop environments yet.

• Windows, meaning Windows 98SE or NT 4.

• Classic MacOS – version 9.

• BeOS.

Stephenson points out that Linux is as powerful as any of them, cheaper, but slower, ugly and unfriendly.

He points out that MacOS 9 is as pretty, friendly, and comprehensible as OSes get, but it doesn't multitask well, it is not very stable, and when a program crashes, your entire computer probably goes with it.

He points out that Windows is overpriced, performs poorly, and is not the best option for anyone – but that everyone runs it and most people just conform with what the mainstream does.

He praises BeOS very highly, which was 100% justified at the time: it was faster than anything else, by a large margin. It has superb multimedia support and integration, better than anything else at the time. It was standards-compliant but not held back by it. For its time, it has a supermodern OS, eliminating tonnes of legacy cruft.

But it didn't have many apps so it was mainly for people in narrow niches, such as music production or maybe video editing.

It was manifestly the future, though. But we're living in the future and it wasn't. This was 23 years ago, nearly a quarter of a century, before KDE and GNOME, before Windows XP, before Mac OS X. You need to know that.

What Unix people interpret as praise here is in fact criticism.

That Unix is very unfriendly and can easily hurt its user. (Think `rm -rf /` here.)

That Unix has a great deal of raw power but maybe more than most people need.

That Unix is, frankly, kinda ugly, and only someone who doesn't care about appearances would choose it.

That something of this brute power is not suitable for fine precision work. (Which it still mostly isn't -- Mac OS X is Unix, tuned and polished, and that's what the creative pros use now.)

Here's a response from 17 years ago: http://garote.bdmonkeys.net/commandline/index.html

Careful observers will notice that the Milwaukee Tool Company also sells other tools. I don't think anybody in the drill department of the company thinks that you should use a drill to cut a tree or trim a hedge.

There was a very similar text regarding models of powerful chainsaws and text editors, does anybody have a link to it?

EDIT: found it https://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-foamy-rules-for-rabid...

Unix is more like a shotgun than a hole hawg. It solves all problems, not necessarily correctly but quickly enough and reliably enough to go home and do something else. Sometimes it hurts you when you fire it and sometimes you lose a couple of toes if you don’t know what you’re doing.

The last line of the article is a killer because I’m writing this on an Apple unix system on a train at the moment after balancing my books.

> They might use Apple/Microsoft OSes to write letters, play video games, or balance their checkbooks, but they cannot really bring themselves to take these operating systems seriously.

As a pdp11 v7, vax 4.1bsd, 4.2bsd, Cray unicos and Unix 32V user I am slightly bemused by this because to all intents and purposes Darwin is unix

If he means "we feel a bit tawdry using a GUI" well sometimes, yes, except SunView and X10R4 and the blit and gnot and perq are kind of out there. I liked the perq. And Ultrix.

I think Stephenson has kind of walked off the reservation a bit. Even plan9 fanatics use a gui.

"In the beginning was the command line" is better.

In order to engage the subject matter of the article, I'm going to pin down the definition of Unix as some POSIX-compatible server OS with some Unix shell running on top of it. I think this encompasses most of the worlds' server infrastructure that runs some variant of Linux. The article implies that Unix is superior to Windows because people use it for real work as opposed to just diddling about in some graphical application. This is a massive misrepresentation. While bare-bones Unix is well designed for simple scenarios, like running a server with ethernet and disk access and static hardware and yields itself to implementing Unix-style shells with fork() and pipes, it is not enough OS for a proper desktop environment. In other cases, it is too much OS. I remember designing and writing software for an embedded voice recording system for railway dispatchers, which had things like remote ethernet configuration, writing the recordings to a FAT32-based SD card on a 60MHzish uC with 128k flash and 64k RAM. It had no OS, everything was running on the bare metal. Going back to my previous example, if one images running a single web server process in a VM container, one could just design some hypothetical architecture, that allows you to do this with all the low-level stuff is put into a small statically linked library, and the app is the OS itself.

Imagine plugging in a USB bluetooth dongle to play some music on your headphones. In response the OS needs to load some drivers, start the bluetooth service, tell the audio service to output audio to your headphones etc. Windows can do this out of the box. Linux can be made to do this, either with a massive proprietary Android task or systemd/pulseaudio/bluez/whatever if you're in the open-source world. At this point Linux can be hardly called a Hole-Hawg.

The perceived superiority of Unix also leads to the false conclusion about Android/macOS/Desktop Linux being superior to Windows (or any other hypotethical fully fledged OS). In order to handle the massive complexity imposed by the complex scenarios, the systems themselves have to be complex as well, with varying success. I'm willing to bet, most of the code that allows me to write this comment on macOS on a HW accelerated GUI using a bluetooth keyboard is part of the Apple-monolith and has nothing to do with Unix/POSIX. The same applies to the other "Unixes" I mentioned earlier.

Personally, I hate the Hole Hawg story. It reeks of pretentiousness and gatekeeping, and worse, the description of the Hole Hawg isn't even accurate. "A cube of metal"? That's not what a quick image search shows. "You screw a second handle in"-- except that the second handle is already there. "It's not sleek" -- again, a image search shows a perfectly normal handle with a perfectly normal grip.

The Unix command line has a lot to recommend it. Notably, the simple ergonomics of the pipeline are indeed great (other OSs have similar pipeline concepts; they just don't get used the same way because they are too clunky).