de5@ornl.gov (Dave Sill) (04/23/91)
I've redirected followups to comp.misc (not alt.flame). In article <19227@rpp386.cactus.org>, jfh@rpp386.cactus.org (John F Haugh II) writes: > >UNIX, at least "real UNIX", is not a "hack". It was a very cohesive >system, well thought out and thoroughly understood by its implementors. From the Jargon File (not the latest version): hack: 1. n. Originally a quick job that produces what is needed, but not well. 2. n. An incredibly good, and perhaps very time-consuming, piece of work that produces exactly what is needed. It's clear that you're aware of only the first meaning or ignoring the second for some reason. I think UNIX qualifies as a hack under def'n 2. >The paradigm that a file is a file is a file is well designed and >implemented. Contrariwise, the BSD notion that a file is a symbolic >link is a socket is a ??? is a collection of "hacks". How about when a file is a device? Or a pipe? Sure, it's a handy abstraction, when it works. Symlinks aren't much different. Weighing the pros and cons, I think I'll keep them all. >Ritchie, Pike, Kernighan, et al, are not "hackers". By your narrow, negative definition. This is what brought this whole thing up: you refuse to acknowledge the command usage of "hack" and "hacker" in the positive sense. >Stallman I can't speak for, but given the grotesque thing called "emacs", >yes, Stallman is a hacker, and it isn't something to be proud of. It >would be possible to implement "emacs" in far less memory, but of course >it wouldn't be a programming language and a desert topping. Then it wouldn't be Emacs, John. Like it not, some people *like* Emacs, and have the resources to run it. The existence of smaller, differently- abled (aka handicapped :-) editors doesn't automatically make Emacs "bad". >Emacs >is provably no more powerful than vi in it's programming abilities, yet >it consumes vastly more resources. This is something clearly to be proud >of ... This is simply ignorant. Machine language entered on the console via DIP switches is provably no more powerful than your favorite HLL, be it C, Pascal, C++, Lisp, Ada, Prologue, or whatever. "Power" is a fairly useless measure of the merit of a program when other factors such as ease of use, portability, robustness, expandability, customizability, etc. aren't also evaluated. -- Dave Sill (de5@ornl.gov) It will be a great day when our schools have Martin Marietta Energy Systems all the money they need and the Air Force Workstation Support has to hold a bake sale to buy a new bomber.
mathew@mantis.co.uk (mathew) (04/29/91)
dfpedro@uswnvg.UUCP (Donn Pedro) writes: > In article <1507@lehi3b15.csee.Lehigh.EDU>, jearly@lehi3b15.csee.Lehigh.EDU ( > : Several thoughts: > : First off, I'm furious at ALL of you who keep using the word "hacker" when > : mean cracker. While there have been hackers who cracked systems, they were > : cracking, not hacking. > > Too bad. The word is being used to mean vandal. You cannot change > it as long as company presidents and the media perpetuate it. On the other hand, they cannot change it so long as we continue to use it with its proper meaning. Call yourself a hacker. Grin at their shocked faces. When they ask what sorts of systems you break into, explain to them what a hacker is. In fact, it's rather useful to have the word misused by the media; if someone uses the word "hacker" when he means "cracker", it's a very clear sign that that person knows little or nothing about computer security and should be ignored. mathew -- If you're a John Foxx fan, please mail me!
wcs) (05/08/91)
]In article <19227@rpp386.cactus.org>, jfh@rpp386.cactus.org (John F Haugh II) writes: ]>UNIX, at least "real UNIX", is not a "hack". It was a very cohesive ]>system, well thought out and thoroughly understood by its implementors. UNIX is a collection of lots of things - there IS a well-thought-out set of primitives, and a lot of emphasis on making maximal use of existing features rather than adding new ones, but, face it, there's a lot of random hackery in there. For instance, look at the disarray in command-line arguments, even since the appearance of getopt() more than 10 years ago. Even simple-minded things like ALWAYS accepting a file name on the command-line in addition to filtering stdin aren't consistent. It's not just that some things need fancier semantics, or that you'd lose compatibility - there are a lot of commands that WOULD have been upward-compatible that never were re-written, and many newer commands still don't use it. I suspect that even John won't argue that vi is a hack :-) And look at how ptys and ttys and sockets and files and pipes and streams pipes are all subtlely different - hopefully this will improve somewhat with increasing streams use in SVR4. One of the blessings, and curses, of UNIX is that it's very easy to write a program to do just what you want, and a lot of people did. In article <1991Apr23.123159.23267@cs.utk.edu> Dave Sill <de5@ornl.gov> writes: ] ]>Stallman I can't speak for, but given the grotesque thing called "emacs", ]>yes, Stallman is a hacker, and it isn't something to be proud of. It Well, Stallman plus cast of thousands, more precisely. ]>would be possible to implement "emacs" in far less memory, but of course ]>it wouldn't be a programming language and a desert topping. ]Then it wouldn't be Emacs, John. Like it not, some people *like* Emacs, ]and have the resources to run it. The existence of smaller, differently- ]abled (aka handicapped :-) editors doesn't automatically make Emacs "bad". The original emacs DID live in much less memory, though the machine was big for its day, and it has ALWAYS had a programming language as part of it (though the early versions were teco rather than lisp). And you could make dessert toppings in emacs back then as well. ]>Emacs is provably no more powerful than vi in it's programming abilities, yet ]>it consumes vastly more resources. This is something clearly to be proud ] "Power" is a fairly useless measure of the merit of a program when ] other factors such as ease of use, portability, robustness,.... Well, you CAN simulate a Turing machine in vi (subject to resource limitations), but it gets much slower than emacs when you do :-) And you CAN get small, clean emacsen which retain the main character of emacs without being as big as GNU. But GNU emacs does have a lot of useful things included in it, and once you start editing N files at a time, using X Windows or even just letting emacs manage the screen, you'll find that N instantiations of vi + more + Mail get pretty piggy as well. Emacs takes a (relatively) clean approach to reality, and lets you build lots of tools on its platform; each tool can be relatively small and manageable, though this is certainly not enforced. I still normally use vi, but it's nice being able to edit a file bigger than 300K (stupid limit in distributed System V versions, left over from pre-virtual-memory days) - if this were emacs, I could fix it. -- Pray for peace; Bill # Bill Stewart 908-949-0705 erebus.att.com!wcs AT&T Bell Labs 4M-312 Holmdel NJ # I never wanted to be a hacker! I wanted to be --- a lumberjack!