I look forward to a copy of the book as soon as my bookstore can get it.
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Regards
Rachael Padman
orVMS disappears (disappeared?) from the Cambridge Starlink node on the 1st ofApril 1994. This is not because no one wants to use it, and it is not becauseof demonstrable failings. It is because Unix is thought (by some) to be agreat improvement. In some ways it may be; in others it falls far short of whatis required in a so-called standard. Of course it is too late tostop this happening, and the trend to Unix extends way beyond astronomy, butneither of these facts means that it is necessarily correct to abandon VMS, northat we should not bemoan its passing.
These views generally result in my being labeled a Luddite by the Unixpriesthood. But Ned Ludd was right --- the new machines did not makeconditions better for ordinary working folk: the people whose conditions wereimmediately improved were those who owned the machinery, and whose profitsthereby increased. Similarly, the change to Unix will, in the short termat least, do more to provide employment for our computers minders than toimprove the average astronomer's relationship with her computer. Unix does haveits advantages, but few of these are intrinsic --- in the sense that they couldnot be implemented within other operating systems --- and to my mind theyare far outweighed by the disadvantages.
Game spider man 1. Alright, I have to admit it. I don't like Unix (or is it 'unix'?) Of courseone can get used to almost anything. But is 'rm' (pronounced 'remove')really synonymous with 'delete'. Do I call the deleters when I want to movehouse. How would my first cousins once-deleted feel? And any reallanguage is at least pronounceable. I have only been able to come up with onealgorithm for creating Unix command names: think of a good English word todescribe what you want to do, then think of an obscure near- orpartial-synonym, throw away all the vowels, arbitrarily shorten what's left,and then, finally, as a sop to the literate programmer, maybe reinsert one ofthe missing vowels. Mnemosyne, goddess of memory, must be rolling in her grave.(She was, incidentally, the mother of the muses, including Urania, the muse ofastronomy.) It is notable that all the machines I have used interactively inthe past spoke to me in plain English. OK, they didn't necessarily have a bigvocabulary, but typing HELP was always likely to return a menu of commands thatwas almost identical from machine to machine and whose function was immediatelyobvious. Although there are some really powerful features in Unix --- such asthe pipe --- what I see (and interact with) is a user interface designedby adolescents and constructed deliberately so as to make access to the machineas difficult as possible for a novice. Is this really a suitable foundation foran international standard?
In reply to this criticism one is normally reminded that Unix was invented fora PDP7, which had about as much memory as an earthworm and CPU power to match.That is, the user interface was designed to minimize the time required todecode a command. That meant short, fixed-case, commands, and no minimummatching. But 1969 is a long time ago, and both memory and speed have improveda thousandfold since then. This response thus goes directly to the core of thecase against Unix. It is old-fashioned. Why is the world now, 25 years later,adopting as a long-term standard a primitive operating system designed when thecapabilities of today's machines were then undreamed of? Actually, the answeris easy. Operating systems cost hardware manufacturers, and therefore consumers(us), money. Unix is free, and whatever its defects at least no one blamesthe hardware manufacturers. So in a world that thinks megaflops orSpecmarks are the only indicator of computer power, Gresham's law holds--- bad software drives out the good.
[This lemming-like rush to adopt Unix just now seems slightly curious. It willbe ironic if it eventuates that Starlink has felt it necessary to adopt Unixjust as Unix is itself superseded. Yet that appears to be a real possibility.Windows NT has been designed with distributed processing and interoperabilityas the major drivers. Here are two quotes from IEEE Spectrum, December 1993:'. Windows NT, by covering almost all the latest RISC processors, opensthe way to a consistent computing environment. Delighted early users arealready contemplating making it their new standard.' And: 'Thus Unix will goon evolving, but largely in order to keep up with Windows NT'.]
Even the commands that are pronounceable are idiosyncratic to say theleast. How can one understand 'biff'?. As people never tire of telling me, itis the name of a programmer's dog (but you'll note, just in case you thoughtthis might help you to memorize the command, this name starts with a lower caseletter). It comes coupled with a twee American icon, that is meaningless in theUK context. And there are other examples. Grep suggests to me that the authorof this one had been reading too much Robert Heinlein (you grok?), or possibly--- and this is in fact quite likely --- was under the influence ofpsychotropic substances at the time. Unix seems to consist largely ofarcanae which be learnt only by taking instruction direct from a priesthood whoseem largely to be stuck in the anal-retentive stage. When yesterday's six-yearolds take over Unix development (in four or five years) I fully expect to seenew commands ldo, nja, mch and rfl. After turtles, dinosaurs. Tamil typing software free for windows 7 32 bit. Will the commandtRex devour your competitor's data?
As intimated above, Unix documentation, or the lack thereof, is a seriousproblem. There is no effective way to find out how to use Unix, otherthan sitting next to an adept and asking for help (and you know what thesepeople are like. Don't you? Haven't you ever been in a computing centre to pickup some output late at night? Dirty cups half full of stale machine coffee,many with cigarette butts floating in them, the floor littered with Twinkieswrappers, insane giggling over some semi-pornographic picture cleverly printedout on a line printer using different characters overprinted to get thegreyscale effect. Grab your output and run!). I remember on one occasionbeing logged into a Unix machine to send some mail, and, not knowing thecommand name, being unable to log out. It was an expensive 8000-mile longtelephone connection, but the machine steadfastly refused to respond to 'help'(or log, logout, logoff or quit). Finally someone suggested I type 'man' (heyman, what the hell do I do now?), and it said 'Documentation is held in theuser area in room 932' (or something like that). Which didn't really help.Anyway, have you ever tried to use man? It's fine as long as you knowwhat you are looking for. How would you ever find out the name of command givenjust the function you wanted to execute? You can't. I just tried to find outwhat the librarian was called, and man was silent on this issue. Sure it givesyou pages of information about 'ar', but nowhere can you find out that it isthe pages about 'ar' that you need to read. Oh, say the adepts, you just use'apropos'. Apropos (or even 'apropos') means'apt, appropriate', which, even if you knew the command existed, wouldnot immediately suggest a way to find out information about something. Inaddition to their other failings, the authors of this command are illiterate.On occasion, as in this instance, the makers of Unix have gone out of their wayto avoid using the appropriate word. What was wrong with `help'?
What next? Oh yes, case-dependence. Well, e.e.cummings made a fortune, or atleast a reputation, out of refusing to use capital letters, and I guess KenThompson might very well have regarded him highly back in 1969. But it's onlyconvention isn't it? Long after 1969 most terminals (teletypes we called themthen) only had capital letters anyway, and I suppose that was stiflingcreativity or something. So if you want to use lower case letters of coursethat should be allowed. But why oh why invent a system where the commands MV,mv, Mv and mV can all do different things? Here is my question to Unixapologists. Would you return your old-fashioned sneaker-net mail to the senderif he or she had forgotten to capitalize your name? Even if it contained acheque?
Well, that's the user interface. As for the applications programs . Evensomething fundamental like the SunOS f77 compiler is a disaster. It doesn'tinclude the full standard as a subset (look at their OPEN statement forunformatted direct access if you don't believe me), and it contains, accordingto my Unix-literate colleagues, several major errors. Gresham's law strikesagain. What about the editors? I don't have time to go into that one! One canonly conclude that the makers of Unix held, and still hold, the ordinarycomputer user in total contempt, and this viewpoint seems to me to bemirrored in the attitudes of the people who are inflicting this awful system onthe rest of us. Does Unix's enormously steep learning curve have any functionother than to deter the faint-hearted, those who may want to usecomputers without necessarily dedicating their lives to them? It does not seemfanciful to suggest that Unix is primarily about separating out the elite fromthe proletariat, the real programmers from the quiche-eaters. It is abouttaking back the mantle of the priesthood, that was lost when manufacturers likeDEC introduced operating systems like VMS. But of course it's all worthwhilereally, because Unix is a standard, and that means it's the same everywhere,and will never change (see what I mean about self-defeating arguments?)
Let me quote again from IEEE Spectrum: 'In reality, however, there aremany Unix-based operating systems; the major ones include Apple Computer'sAUX, Digital Equipment's Ultrix, Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX, IBM's AIX, theOpen Software Foundation's OSF-1, Sun Microsystems' Sun OS and Solaris, andthe Santa Cruz Operation's Xenix and SCO Unix. With such an assortment, users[who work] with platforms from several manufacturers [are] caught in thebind of supporting multiple releases of multiple versions of Unix.' Thismonoculture is divided by a supposedly common tongue. Unix is not astandard any more than English is. One of the touted virtues of Unixis that you can unplug any component and plug in something elsewith the same name, so that you can tailor it to your needs (indeed theStarlink .cshrc does this with your Tex commands!). So while you can go to anyVMS system anywhere in the world and be instantly at home, you can't depend ona Unix command to do what you think it should anyway. Sometimes even theoptions are different. Take the tar command (please!), which is already anightmare where lower-case `a' means 'check first' and upper-case `A' means'delete all my disk files without asking' (or something like that --- I maynot have the details exactly right). In some versions of tar these meaningsare reversed. This is a virtue?
OK, I admit it, I was joking there. But I'm not joking when I quote fromSUN 145:
There is a distressing mindset amongst Unix cognoscenti. Most attacks on Unixare answered with statements to the effect that make and grep are wonderful,that redirection and piping are very clever, and that the whole system is muchmore 'elegant' than VMS. Well, I admit that make is wonderful. Still, it isonly an application, and as such could Soft mac emulator. be implemented on any operatingsystem. As for grep. A few days ago I thought to search for each occurrenceof the $ character in a piece of code (so that I could move it from itsnon-standard position at one end of the FORMAT statement to the alternativenon-standard position at the other end, to make it work on a Sun). DutifullyI translated 'SEARCH [-.]*.FOR', and typed 'grep '$' ./*/*.f | lpr'(Note the clever redirection of the output to the line printer.) Thefollowing morning I found the entire source code of SPECX in a heap beside theOKI printer. This does not strike me as very elegant! Neither is it elegantthat the X-terminal driver is so primitive that it reflects charactersimmediately rather than waiting until input is requested, nor that everyone hasto include keyboard remappings in their .Xthingy files (in fact this part of itis worse than a PC), nor that when talking to an applications program you can'tedit the line you are typing except by using the delete key. It is not elegantthat logical names --- sorry, environment variables --- are not inherited byprograms, so that each program has to include code to parse input and translatethe logical name before opening a file or whatever. Well, I'm sure I could goon forever. And the minute you criticize Unix to your Starlink friends they say'Yes, I agree, but I'm not allowed to say that!'
A Starlink mole hassuggested to me that project staff are not unaware of the sort of Unixfailing detailed here, but that the change to Unix was largely mandated byexternal pressures. Canute could not hold back the tide (and knew it), andobviously neither can Starlink, even it wants to. It's a pity however that thetide seems to be largely composed of lemmings --- that is, slightlycomputer-literate users, who are persuaded by the Unix hype, fancy joining thegrep-awk priesthood, and mistakenly confuse the time spent learning how to useUnix with productive work. Unfortunately they never have to suffer thedefects of the system they have foisted on the rest of us.
Well, it's not really funny. The change to Unix has real implications forastronomers, which have generally not been addressed. Yes, it means that we canall run Unix mega-packages like IRAF and SAO-Image (name your favourite). Unixand C however form a powerful deterrent to the average astronomer to write heror his own code (and the average astronomer's C is much, much worse than hisFortran used to be). The powers-that-be in the software world of course havealways felt that 'ordinary' users (astronomers in this case) should be usingsoftware and not writing it. The cynic might feel that since those same powersnearly all make their living by writing software, and get even more pay whenthey manage other programmers, then they have a vested interest in bringingabout a state of affairs where the rest of us are reduced to mere supplicants,dependent on them for all our software needs. It is clear that Unix does notpose an insuperable barrier --- the ever-expanding armies of hackers out thereare evidence enough that the barrier can be scaled given enough time andenthusiasm for the task. But hacking is not astronomy, and hackers are notastronomers, and it is astronomy and astronomers I worry about. We shouldn'thave to scale the Unix barrier, and it is all the sadder because, since theadvent of a VMS-based Starlink, ordinary astronomers have had something deniedto most other scientists in this country --- readily accessible, reliable,user-friendly computing power that can be easily harnessed to a particularastronomical requirement. https://coolnfile389.weebly.com/boson-audio-recorder-and-editor-1-2-9.html. Maybe VMS does baby its users. Maybe we have paidmore per Specmark so that we could use the Specmarks we had efficiently. Butalong with the rest of the world, we are now losing this nice friendly system.As with instrumentation and the National Observatories, we are having to teachour students how to fit their problems to facilities provided by others,whereas the UK reputation in astronomy was created by fitting the facilities tothe problem.
| Johannes Ockeghem voc, 1410-1497 BE album by |
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| Soběslav Raizl voc, tenor vocals, ténors, performer, les madrigalistes de prague |
| Bernhard Klebel rec, ob, 1936-2013 AT bombarde, bombarde soprano, performer, membres du musica antiqua, vienne |
| Paul Maurer perc, bombarde, bombarde ténor, performer, membres du musica antiqua, vienne |
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| René Clemencic fl, rec, *1928 AT recorder, flute À bec et orgue, performer, membres du musica antiqua, vienne |
| Helmut Ascherl tb, ts, trombone, trombone renaissance, performer, membres du musica antiqua, vienne |
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