UNIX ËÁË ÌÉÔÅÒÁÔÕÒÁ (1/2)
Alexander Varin
> Curator: Alexander Varin
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> The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
If there's nothing different about UNIX people, how come so many were
liberal-arts majors? It's the love of words that makes UNIX stand out.
Thomas Scoville
In the late 1980s, I worked in the advanced R&D arm of the Silicon Valley's
regional telephone company. My lab was populated mostly by Ph.D.s and gifted
hackers. It was, as you might expect, an all-UNIX shop.
The manager of the group was an exception: no
advanced degree, no technical credentials. He
seemed pointedly self-conscious about it. We
suspected he felt (wrongly, we agreed) underconfident
of his education and intellect. One day, a story
circulated through the group that confirmed our
suspicions: the manager had confided he was indeed
intimidated by the intelligence of the group, and was
taking steps to remedy the situation. His prescription,
though, was unanticipated: "I need to become more of
an intellectual," he said. "I'm going to learn UNIX."
Needless to say, we made more than a little fun out of this. I mean, come on:
as if UNIX could transform him into a mastermind, like the supplicating
scarecrow in "The Wizard of Oz." I uncharitably imagined a variation on the old
Charles Atlas ads: "Those senior engineers will never kick sand in my face
again."
But part of me was sympathetic: "The boss isn't entirely wrong, is he? There is
something different about UNIX people, isn't there?" In the years since, I've
come to recognize what my old manager was getting at. I still think he was
misguided, but in retrospect I think his belief was more accurate than I
recognized at the time.
To be sure, the UNIX community has its own measure of technical
parochialism and nerdy tunnel vision, but in my experience there seemed to be
a suspicious overrepresentation of polyglots and liberal-arts folks in UNIX
shops. I'll admit my evidence is sketchy and anecdotal. For instance, while
banging out a line of shell, with a fellow engineer peering over my shoulder, I
might make an intentionally obscure literary reference:
if test -z `ps -fe | grep whom` then echo ^G fi # Let's see for whom the bell
tolls.
UNIX colleagues were much more likely to recognize and play in a way I'd never
expect in the VMS shops, IBM's big-iron data centers, or DOS ghettos on my
consulting beat.
Being a liberal-arts type myself (though I cleverly concealed this in my
resume),
I wondered why this should be true. My original explanation--UNIX's historical
association with university computing environments, like UC Berkeley's--didn't
hold up over the years; many of the UNIX-philiacs I met came from schools with
small or absent computer science departments. There had to be a connection,
but I had no plausible hypothesis.
It wasn't until I started regularly asking UNIX refuseniks what they didn't
like
about UNIX that better explanations emerged.
Some of the prevailing dislike had a distinctly populist flavor--people caught
a
whiff of snobbery about UNIX and regarded it with the same proletarian
resentment usually reserved for highbrow institutions like opera or ballet.
They
had a point: until recently, UNIX was the lingua franca of computing's upper
crust. The more harried, practical, and underprivileged of the computing world
seemed to object to this aura of privilege. UNIX adepts historically have been
a
coddled bunch, and tend to be proud of their hard-won knowledge. But these
class differences are fading fast in modern computing environments. Now UNIX
engineers are more common, and low- or no-cost UNIX variations run on
inexpensive hardware. Certainly UNIX folks aren't as coddled in the age of NT.
There was a standard litany of more specific criticisms: UNIX is difficult and
time-consuming to learn. There are too many things to remember. It's arcane
and needlessly complex.
But the most recurrent complaint was that it was too text-oriented. People
really
hated the command line, with all the utilities, obscure flags, and arguments
they
had to memorize. They hated all the typing. One mislaid character and you had
to start over. Interestingly, this complaint came most often from users of the
GUI-laden Macintosh or Windows platforms. People who had slaved away on
DOS batch scripts or spent their days on character-based terminals of
multiuser non-UNIX machines were less likely to express the same grievance.
Though I understood how people might be put off by having to remember such
willfully obscure utility names like cat and grep, I continued to be puzzled at
why
they resented typing. Then I realized I could connect the complaint with the
scores of "intellectual elite" (as my manager described them) in UNIX shops.
The common thread was wordsmithing; a suspiciously high proportion of my
UNIX colleagues had already developed, in some prior career, a comfort and
fluency with text and printed words. They were adept readers and writers, and
UNIX played handily to those strengths. UNIX was, in some sense, literature to
them. Suddenly the overrepresentation of polyglots, liberal-arts types, and
voracious readers in the UNIX community didn't seem so mysterious, and
pointed the way to a deeper issue: in a world increasingly dominated by image
culture (TV, movies, .jpg files), UNIX remains rooted in the culture of the
word.
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