I just finished reading The Art of UNIX Programming. In short, I liked it a lot.
Here are a few fun quotes:
Similarly, all of his discussion on Emacs vs. Vi seemed a bit biased. I know it's hard not to be biased on this topic, but I was a bit frustrated when he called all of Emacs' complexity "optional complexity" and all of Vi's complexity "accidental and ad-hoc complexity." Because of his statements I even gave Emacs another shot. However, as usual, I was reminded that in theory Emacs is my favorite editor, but in practice I'm a Vim user.
Nonetheless, I do have high praise for this book. When I was totally burnt out and couldn't code for two months, I found this book refreshing and relaxing. I owe Raymond my thanks :)
Here are a few fun quotes:
Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming -- Brian Kernighan [p. 14]
Software design and implementation should be a joyous art, a kind of high-level play...To do Unix philosophy right, you need to have (or recover) that attitude. [p. 27]
Microsoft actually admitted publicly that NT security is impossible in March 2003. [p. 69, Unfortunately, the URL he provided no longer works.]
One good test for whether an API is well designed is this one: if you try to write a description of it in purely human language (with no source-code extracts allowed), does it make sense? It is a very good idea to get into the habit of writing informal descriptions of your APIs before you code them. [p. 85, this is a good explanation for why I write docstrings before I write code.]
C++ is anticompact--the language's designer has admitted that he doesn't expect any one programmer to ever understand it all. [p. 89]One thing Raymond does very well is document things that the rest of us implicitly assume. For instance, he described the various cultures revolving around UNIX. Now I know why I'm so mixed up! I sympathize with several different cultures such as:
- Old-school UNIX hackers
- The Open Source movement
- The Free Software movement
- BSD hackers
- MIT Lisp hackers
- The IETF
- Linux is so commonplace these days, what should we do now that everyone takes it for granted?
- OS X has really won the hearts of a lot of developers. Is there any hope that the rest of the world will move closer to the Free Software ideal? (Please see my post A Hybrid World of Open and Closed Source Software.)
- I'd love to get his take on Eclipse, TextMate, and modern-day Emacs and Vim.
- I'd also love to get his opinions on Ruby and Rails.
Similarly, all of his discussion on Emacs vs. Vi seemed a bit biased. I know it's hard not to be biased on this topic, but I was a bit frustrated when he called all of Emacs' complexity "optional complexity" and all of Vi's complexity "accidental and ad-hoc complexity." Because of his statements I even gave Emacs another shot. However, as usual, I was reminded that in theory Emacs is my favorite editor, but in practice I'm a Vim user.
Nonetheless, I do have high praise for this book. When I was totally burnt out and couldn't code for two months, I found this book refreshing and relaxing. I owe Raymond my thanks :)
Comments
Copies of the relevant papers and presentations are out there on the net. Well worth the time to search them out.
I think it might've helped me land my first programming job (back in 2004).
ESR touched my life in so many ways.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/