That tidbit about .S vs .a is a lovely detail. "A Research Unix Reader" has other cultural details called out that're similar - https://doc.cat-v.org/unix/unix-reader/A.Research.Unix.Reade.... Two of my favourites are the idea that originally a shell script couldn't be part of a pipeline ("programs that were likely to read from shell scripts, especially sh and ed, were made to read their input one character at a time. It was impossible to pipe into a shell script because the standard input was already dedicated to the script. For the same reason a program in a shell script could not take input from a terminal except when given the terminal’s real name.") and this note from the man page for sort v1:

> A bug note in join(1) declares, ‘‘The [field-specification] conventions of join, sort, comm, uniq, look and awk(1) are wildly incongruous.’’ Although these programs are often used together, they remain, like American weights and measures, sturdily eccentric.

I remember thinking that commands were weirdly unsimilar as I was first learning them; it took this many years for me to see one of the early authors wrote an oopsie about them :)

The quickest source I can find this moment for my claim is an interview with Ken Thompson in IEEE magazine called "Unix and Beyond: An Interview with Ken Thompson". Here's the quote, "At one point, I took BCPL from Martin Richards at MIT and converted it into what I thought was a fairly straight translation, but it turned out to be a different language so I called it B, and then Dennis took it and added types and called it C." You can read the whole thing at https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/762801 (or https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spring03/cs333/... if you prefer plain text).

When I write the newsletter, I'm _fairly_ sure one of Thompson's big interviews on YouTube has him call this out more clearly, but if I'm misrecalling I'll be sure to write exactly what I can figure out and where I'm sourcing the ideas from.

The specific Dennis Ritchie essay that I was referring to, though, is https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/portp... - "Portability of C Programs and the UNIX System". He coauthored it with Stephen Johnson, who can count Yacc amongst his many contributions to Unix.

Seeing the quote from Doug McIlroy many years later lodged in my brain as answering a question I didn't even have, and I've been looking for a good reason to use it ever since.

There's a lot of cool small details like that in so many early white papers about Unix; I'm looking forwards to working through a good number of them over the next 12 months. I think next I'll look at Dennis Ritchie's paper on the impact of migrating Unix from assembly to C. It may give me good opportunity to cover the B->C change as background, which is fascinating to see.

My subject is some details surrounding the first white paper that Bell Labs published about Unix was "The Unix Time-Sharing System". I wrote what Ken Thompson was doing in between the end of Multics but before he found the "little used PDP-7" that he wrote Unix on, the difference between opening files on Multics and Unix, and what the "comfile" mentioned in the paper is.

I wrote this without AI involvement; I follow Unix history because I love knowing what the history is and what I can learn from it, and I love showing others these sorts of cool details.

I'd love to hear any feedback you might have :)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49401122

Points: 19

# Comments: 8

I'm not trying to persuade that these tools are essential or anything, just highlighting that there's a few small details some take care of that're fairly nice.

If you maintain one shell per process-that-needs-a-secret-in-the-env then it doesn't matter, but if you're using long-running shells then direnv can load and unload env vars. It also gives you a nice little heads-up that it loaded/unloaded variables.

Any chance you've got any other older unix nuggets that come to mind?

It’s in reading that stuff that I grew To appreciate troff, nroff and the whole runoff family, and how CTSS was really astonishingly influential.

I also know that thinking about pattern matching is fun, it's a little puzzle solved with a skillset that transfers to other cli tools.

Post also opens with a classic interview question I've used for years: no ls on the box, five ways to list the directory tree you're in. A handful of answers at the bottom :)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49250994

Points: 3

# Comments: 5

What I do see is that the frontier models can get easy stuff mostly right, but they can’t maintain a small codebase such that it behaves correctly across several mutations. When the going requires a lot of context, tests get rewritten to not do anything and features that manipulate similar data get divergent implementations. That’s fine for goofing around personally, but I see vibe coders getting their asses handed to them when they mistake that for a well maintained codebase and try to sell a product.

Please, don’t mistake an impressive technology for a miracle; there will still be people needed to make codebases healthy for a long time to come.

Drawing apps do regularly allow for canvas rotation, so I’m sure this’ll turn out to be useful for some class of application that I’m not considering.

We're all in this tooling & community evolution together.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48270364

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

I have a container that runs a 4.3 BSD userland using opensimh; it's not super hard to set up, just takes a bit of patience and willingness to learn how opensimh works.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48187593

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Something that's worth bearing in mind is that "dark matter" doesn't actually mean "totally new never before seen thing" it means "we don't know what this matter is". So, for example, a candidate that wouldn't be super novel but could fit the bill is microscopic black holes. In that sense, the hypothesis is more mundane than it might seem.