eric@snark.thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond) (12/21/90)
In the last several days I have received a number of letters from
ex-ITS hackers in regard to my effort to update and publish a 1991
Jargon File.
I have responded individually to a couple of these notes, but now feel
the interests of all parties are best served by a consolidated
response which collects and amplifies points I have made in private
email. This posting is directed in particular to:
David Chapman <zvona@gang-of-four.stanford.edu>
Jonathan Rees (altdorf.ai.mit.edu!jar)
David Vinayak Wallace <gumby@gang-of-four.stanford.edu>
Christopher C. Stacy <cstacy@wheat-chex.ai.mit.edu>
Chris Garrigues <7thson@Slcs.Slb.Com>
Kent M. Pitman <kmp@stony-brook.scrc.symbolics.com>
Devon Sean Mccullough <Devon@ghoti.lcs.mit.edu>
David A. Moon <moon@cambridge.apple.com>
Scott Mckay <swm@sapsucker.scrc.symbolics.com>
Alan Bawden <alan@ai.mit.edu>
A copy is also going to lcs.mit.edu!nick, who has kindly offered
to advertise a copy of the current text on lcs so the ex-ITSers nearby
can get a look at it. I will send it to him as soon as I have caught
up on the current batch of submissions.
The criticisms I have received share a number of common themes:
1. That any claim of connection to the old on-line JARGON.TXT or
Steele-1983 can only be a pretense and should be dropped.
2. That the UNIX and ITS cultures are definitely separate and that
mixing ITS jargon with new material is confusing or misleading.
3. That I do not understand the ITS culture, am thus unequipped
to represent it, and should leave it and its artifacts alone.
4. That the effort necessarily "rewrites history" in a way that
would misrepresent the attitudes and ideas of ITS people now
and in the past.
5. That ITS-derived entries should not be changed; that the most
updating acceptable to ITSers would be to publish an annotated edition,
with new material kept rigidly separate from the old.
6. That the name of the effort should not be `the Jargon File' but
something different.
7. That the new material is UNIX-centric.
In what follows, I will try to answer these points one by one.
1. That any claim of connection to the old on-line JARGON.TXT or
Steele-1983 can only be a pretense and should be dropped.
False by the most obvious test -- Guy Steele didn't think so, he
sent me softcopy of Steele-1983 to merge in, and I have done so.
The new File incorporates nearly the entire text of the most recent
JARGON maintained on prep.ai.mit.edu. The revision was begun quite
intentionally as an update of that material, though I had no idea at
that time that a weekend hack was going to turn into a mega-project
and a book.
Therefore, whether jargon-2.x.x is an evolutionary descendent of
JARGON.TXT cannot be in question; by every test, it certainly is.
Whether that continuity validly reflects a cultural continuity
is a fair question.
2. That the UNIX and ITS cultures are definitely separate and that
mixing ITS jargon with new material is confusing or misleading.
This is also false, though I am beginning to understand why ITSers
tend to believe it.
I first read the Jargon File while I was an ITS tourist fourteen years
ago. At that time the ITS culture cast a long shadow over the ARPAnet
-- not the least because lots of people far outside MIT were impressed
by the humor and spirit of the old Jargon File. Many of us adopted the
File's slang as our own, feeling that we'd found a tangible sign of
the community of minds we'd half-guessed to be out there.
As UNIX burgeoned and USENET grew, the ITS influence receded in
relative importance but remained with us as a recognizable and honored
strain in the evolving poly-culture of the net.
Even though I call myself a UNIX hacker these days and haven't
seriously hacked LISP for nearly ten years, FROB and MOBY and all the
rest have been part of my cultural heritage for half my life -- and
this is *not in the least unusual*!
Yes, the UNIX community has an identity of its own. But enough of us
have the old JARGON.TXT as part of our roots that it would have done
gross violence to history *not* to start from there.
3. That I do not understand the ITS culture, am thus unequipped
to represent it, and should leave it and its artifacts alone.
I don't claim perfect understanding; I don't need to. I am not
interested in eulogizing bygone days, but in creating a document
that speaks to present ones. If you want history, well, JARGON.TXT
is out there.
I suppose one might claim that I never knew the `real' ITS culture at
all, only its reflection in the File. I could probably argue that,
because (among other things) I've known RMS for more than ten years,
visited the Lab back in the days of its glory, read a lot of the
folklore, and heard many of the war stories from one point of view or
another.
But I don't need to argue that either, because I'm not really
interested in `representing' ITS culture per se and don't pretend to
be doing so.
Yes, I think the ITS tradition had and still has much to offer (it
would be damn silly of me to think otherwise, considering that I'm
typing this in EMACS). But I didn't go into this intending to
represent anybody at all, just to distill some history and reports of
current usage into an educational and amusing whole.
That leads straight to:
4. That the effort necessarily "rewrites history" in a way that
would misrepresent the attitudes and ideas of ITS people now
and in the past.
This is really hubris. The wider culture doesn't think of the
file as a historical document, but as a collection of intellectual
graffiti.
To the extent that it *is* a historical document, it's become mythic
history to all of us -- a sort of hacker-culture Matter of Britain
indirectly chronicling the adventures of the Knights of the Lab as
they strove against darkness and ignorance. That the real people
involved had feet of clay, and that things have changed a lot since
then, is understood.
This oversimplifies in its own way, of course. It's also possible to
question just whose history the file mythologized on a more factual
level. The claim that my effort would rewrite ITS history in
particular assumes a cathedral-like purity the original didn't possess
-- or am I just imagining all the stuff from SAIL and WPI and CMU and
elsewhere?
5. That ITS-derived entries should not be changed; that the most
updating acceptable to ITSers would be to pub an annotated edition,
with new material kept rigidly separate from the old.
I have neither the ability nor the desire to nuke all existing copies
of JARGON.TXT. That should be sufficient answer by itself.
However, I do feel compelled to add that there seems something faintly
ludicrous about treating the File as a sacred, untouchable icon.
Where has the keen irreverence that was so much of the original's
appeal gone?
Must I conclude that many of the playful geniuses of 1977 have soured
into a misanthropic gang of navel-gazing fuddy-duddies? That the only
role they can now imagine for the File is one which exalts history and
makes only the most grudging concessions to time and change?
I hope not. But more than once on this long strange trip I've felt a
weird sense of dislocation, of disbelief, of sadness -- because, among
other things, too many of the people willing to condemn the new File
have done so on the basis of rumor, without having read it or offered
constructive criticisms. I simply could not reconcile the bold,
youthful spirit of the original File with the peevish chuntering now
emanating from some of its would-be defenders.
To be fair, though, many critics do have the name issue separated from
the content issues. This leads to:
6. That the name of the effort should not be `the Jargon File' but
something different.
There have been times I was almost tempted to agree with this -- until
I thought about the contributions and reactions of the vast majority
of the people who've seen it. The revision process has acquired a
momentum of its own -- the fact that I've done it in public has
changed the very conditions under which we can debate what `is' or `is
not' the One True Jargon File.
To the USENET and the whole world other than the last ITS purists,
what I'm collecting *is* `the jargon'; functionally, linguistically,
and mythically this document is as intimately related to JARGON.TXT
as it could possibly be and remain a celebration of the present -- and
if I were to change the official name to pacify disgruntled ITSers,
the net would just nod and go on calling it the Jargon File!
But even that ducks the most fundamental issue. Even if I *had* the
power to make people think of 2.x.x as something else, *I wouldn't do
it*. It was long past time for JARGON.TXT to be superseded -- it just
isn't representative any more; it no longer fills the communal needs
that originally earned it a special place in hacker folklore.
I guess I was responding to this in a half-conscious way when I began
the revision. I'm very conscious about it now, having received
bucketfuls of email expressing the most touching gratitude for the
drafts I've posted, from old-timer and newbie alike. It is clear that
the new File, even in the rough, typo-ridden form publicly seen so far,
*does* fill those needs.
Please understand that I claim no special prescience about this; in a
weird way I even doubt I deserve much of the credit. When I started,
I was simply responding as a member of my culture to a conspicuous gap;
if it hadn't been me, it would've been somebody else (quite possibly someone
without my ties to the historical ITS who would have had far less
respect for the older parts of the material).
Finally, there is:
7. That the new material is UNIX-centric.
Of all the criticisms levelled at the effort, I think this is the
single one that really troubles me -- because I agree that it may be a
problem, and I'm not sure how I can fix it.
I could dismiss it by arguing that hacker *culture*, taken as a whole,
is now UNIX-centric; and that such a bias is appropriate, and part of
the flavor, just as (say) the anti-Multics bias in JARGON.TXT was in
relation to the TOPS-10 and ITS-dominated culture it was describing.
I have two problems with this. The first, which is more personal, is
that (even though I believe it's true) if I heard it from somebody
else it would sound lazy, too easy a copout for a guy who happens to
be a professional UNIX wizard living in a USENET world. The second,
which is more `social', is that it clearly raises the risk of
discounting and smothering contributions from vigorous `minority'
computing cultures that might otherwise add breadth and color to the
File.
I have tried to address the problem by making a special effort to
cultivate respondents from non-UNIX technical cultures (Mac fans,
Multics people, MS-DOS hackers, etc.) To some extent I've been able
to lean on my own career history, which happens to span an unusually
broad range of machines and languages. And there are a lot of entries
from inside -- of all places -- *IBM* in the File.
Nevertheless, I feel continuing concern about this, and it is a
respect in which I would appreciate constructive help from ex-ITSers
and everybody else.
Please -- rather than complaining that I am "rewriting history", *help
me write it*! I would *like* to have entries for `UNIX WEENIE' and
`WEENIX' that are just as funny and snide as JARGON.TXT was about
other things, preferably entries written by a certified unix-hater
with a cursor dipped in acid.
More generally, I would *like* to have entries that skewer present
computing environments by comparing them to `stone knives and
bearskins', providing only that they adduce something suitably
illuminating and funny about ITS or their targets.
Please read the new File. Think about it. And then ask yourselves what
you can do that's *constructive*, that adds to the richness of the
culture and represents your viewpoints within it, rather than simply
trying to stop the effort or redirect it away from any particular herd
of sacred cows.
And more than that -- this will be a book. I want it to be a *good*
book. I want it to capture the exuberance and vitality of our
*shared* culture. I want it to present a positive picture in this
decade when legal trends and the acts of a criminal minority threaten
to erode the freedom to explore that we've all enjoyed and taken for
granted.
Please help me show that the true-hacker spirit is still alive.
--
Eric S. Raymond = eric@snark.thyrsus.com (mad mastermind of TMN-Netnews)oz@yunexus.yorku.ca (Ozan Yigit) (12/22/90)
In article <1YrwmR#9NtvNV0kZTMv8238mB5crvfP=eric@snark.thyrsus.com> eric@snark.thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond) writes: > ... rather than complaining that I am "rewriting history", *help >me write it*! Perhaps therein lies the problem. oz --- Where the stream runneth smoothest, | Internet: oz@nexus.yorku.ca the water is deepest. - John Lyly | UUCP: utzoo/utai!yunexus!oz