2025-01-30 Thu 17:39 Back in my UNIX days

> If you want a new idea, read an old book.
> - Ivan Pavlov

I have read "The UNIX Programming Environment" book [1] by Brian
W. Kernighan and Rob Pike published in 1978.  And I found many ideas
that are not new at all.  It almost felt like nothing has changed.

First of all I rly like the book.  It felt like going back in time.
As a reader I was playing the role of new employee hired to working in
company that has UNIX machine so I better learn how to use it well.
But I expected the authors to describe UNIX as this new great thing.
Instead they spoke of it as an middle age OS with a lot of legacy
ideas that are not going away and we have to live with them.  I never
realised how old the design of UNIX is.  Overall picture of it was
positive but authors never hesitated to point out problems in the
system.  This helped build trust in the book.

I traveled 47 year back in time and it felt like the hardware is old
but not the software.  Maybe it was written right on first try and
don't need to change?  This might be because the idea of UNIX is very
solid.  Few well put together primitives working in harmony.  And OS
for programmers.  Not as clumsy or random as Windows; an elegant
software for a more civilized age.  But on the other hand it might be
that we are just stuck forever with it, exactly like we are stuck with
QWERTY keyboards only because this is what we are used to have.

> Ideas are bullet proof.
> - V

It was fun to see programs written in old C.  Code was much simpler
and direct.  Shell scripting, practically the same (not a complement).
Extensive usage of Ed text editor through out the book was a pleasant
surprise (big fan).  I also read the paper "The Flat File Database
Generator Ffg" by Douglas E. Comer which was mentioned in the book.
But I will probably write about it some other time.

It's amazing to see how thoughts of UNIX creators and programmers that
wrote most influential shell programs are still shaping landscape of
programming.  What a legends.  Science never experienced creation or
death of anything.  There is only low and high entropy.  Still such
ideas emit a lot of energy so I can't help but wander if you can
actually revers the entropy with a single thought [2].

> What we do now echoes in eternity.
> - Marcus Aurelius

But enough of that.  I see now how difficult it is to escape decisions
made when UNIX was created as almost everything is either UNIX or bad
copy of it.  It's difficult to escape from invisible cage even when
the door is open.  Imagine totally different platform.  Sequences of
bytes don't have to be referenced with tree like file structure.  It
could be a relational model like in database.  Or flat structure with
collection of tags for each blob of data.  How to free ones mind from
patterns to get deeper understanding?

> If you are to truly understand, then you will need the contrast,
> not adherence to a single idea.
> - Kreia

[1] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix_Programming_Environment
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question

EOF