The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40110729 - April 2024 (87 comments)

The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38464715 - Nov 2023 (139 comments)

The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31417690 - May 2022 (86 comments)

The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19416485 - March 2019 (157 comments)

The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13781815 - March 2017 (307 comments)

The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9976694 - July 2015 (5 comments)

The Unix Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7726115 - May 2014 (50 comments)

Anti-foreword to the Unix haters handbook by dmr - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3106271 - Oct 2011 (31 comments)

The Unix Haters Handbook - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1272975 - April 2010 (28 comments)

The Unix Hater’s Handbook, Reconsidered - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=319773 - Sept 2008 (5 comments)

> 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.

Like:

1. You start and stop services with 'systemctl start/stop nginx'. But logs for that service can be read through an easy-to-remember 'journalctl -xeu nginx.service'. Why not 'systemctl logs nginx'? Nobody knows.

2. If you look at the built-in help for systemctl, the top-level options list things like `--firmware-setup` and `--image-policy`.

3. systemd unifies devices, mounts, and services into unit files with consistent syntax. Except where it doesn't. For example, there's a way to specify a retry policy for a regular service, but not for mount units. Why? Nobody knows.

(To be clear, I _like_ systemd. But it definitely follows the true Unix philosophy of being wildly internally inconsistent.)

I wonder why Dennis Ritchie was so infuriated though. He criticizes them for wanting simple functionality, but it's not because language is a powerful tool for solving problems it's because it limits the potential of the platform to it's functionality (which has been simplified and in of itself limited).

So this is confusing to me. Using language to solve problems is the advantage that Unix offers. But, neither the authors nor Dennis care about this? Or they do care in limited ways, but ultimately it's about something else?