Pages

A blog about teaching Programming to non-CompSci students by Tim Love (Cambridge University Engineering Department). I do not speak on behalf of the university, the department, or even the IT group I belong to.

Tuesday 5 August 2014

"The Art of UNIX Programming"

This book's by Eric S. Raymond, published by Pearson Education. Though it dates from 2004 it's still interesting. It filled some gaps in my knowledge.

Misc

  • "There is evidence [Hatton97] that when one plots defect density versus module size, the curve is U-shaped and concave upwards" (p.86)
  • "second-system effect" - "the urge to add everything that was left out the first time around" (p.29). "third-system effect" - "after the second system has collapsed of its own weight, there is a chance to go back to simplicity and get it really right. The original Unix was a third system" [after CTSS and Multics] (p.29)
  • "Holding down the shift key required actual effort: thus the preference for lower case, and the use of "-" (rather than the perhaps more logical "+") to enable options" (p.242)
  • "marshalling" means "serialising"
  • "A program is transparent when it is possible to form a simple mental model of its behaviour that is actually predicive for all or most cases" (p.133)
  • "Software systems are discoverable when they include features that are designed to help you build in your mind a correct mental model of what they do and how they work. (p.133)
  • "Threading is a performance hack ... they do not reduce global complexity but rather increase it" (p.159)
  • "Despite occasional exceptions such as NFS and the GNOME project, attempts to import CORBA, ASN.1, and other forms of remote-procedure-call interface have largely failed - these technologies have not been naturalized into the Unix culture" (p.178)
  • "Today, RPC and the Unix attachment to text streams are converging in an interesting way, through protocols like XML-RPC and SOAP" (p.179)
  • "Unix was the first production operating system to be ported between differing processor familes" (p.393)

Programs

  • "Emacs stands for Editing MACroS" (p.351)
  • "yacc has a rather ugly interface, through exported global variables with the name prefix yy_. This is because it predates structs in C; in fact, yacc predates C itself; the first implementation was written in C's predecessor B" (p.353)
  • scp calls ssh "as a slave process, intercepting enough information from ssh's standard output to reformat the reports as an ASCII animation of a progress bar" (p.169)
  • "No discussion of make(1) would be complete without an acknowledgement that it includes one of the worst design botches in the history of Unix. The use of tab" . The author said that he "had a user population of about a dozen, most of them friends, and I didn't want to screw up my embedded base. The rest, sadly, is history"

Languages

  • "Outside of Fortran's dwindling niche in scientific and engineering computing, and excluding the vast invisible dark mass of COBOL financial applications at bank and insurance companies, C and its offspring C++ have now (in 2003) dominated applications programming almost completely for more than a decade. It may therefore seem perverse to assert that C and C++ are nowadays almost always the wrong vehicle for beginning new applications development. But it's true; C and C++ optimize for machine efficiency at the expense of increased implementation and (especially) debugging time" (p.323)
  • "C++ is anti-compact - the language's designer has admitted that he doesn't expect any one programmer to ever understand it all" (p.89)
  • "Python is "generally thought to be the least efficient and slowest of the major scripting languages, a price it pays for runtime type polymorphism" (p.337) "it encourages clean, readable code and combines accessibility with scaling up well to large projects" (p.338)

O-O

  • "The OO design concept initially proved valuable in the design of graphics systems, graphical user interfaces, and certain kinds of simulation. To the surprise and gradual disillusionment of many, it has proven difficult to demonstrate the benefits of OO outside those areas" (p.101-2)
  • "Unix programmers have always tended to be a bit more skeptical about OO than their counterparts elsewhere" (p.102)
  • "a lot of programming courses teach thick layering as a way to satisfy the Rule of Representation. In this view, having lots of classes is equated with embedding knowledge in your data. The problem with this is that too often, the 'smart data' in the glue layers is not actually about any natural entity in whatever the program is manipulating - it's just about being glue" (p.102)
  • "One reason that OO has succeeded most where it has (GUIs, simulations, graphics) may be because it's relatively difficult to get the ontology of types wrong in those domains" (p.103)

Quotes by others

  • "This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface" (Doug McIlroy)
  • "La perfection est atteinte non quand il ne reste rein à ajouter, mais quand il ne reste rien à enlever" (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)
  • "C++: an octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog" (anon)
  • "Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity" (David Gelernter,"Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology")
  • "When in doubt, use brute force" (Ken Thompson)
  • "If you know what you're doing, three layers is enough; if you don't, even seventeen levels won't help" (Padlipsky)