Essence and Accident in Unix Tradition

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Essence and Accident in Unix Tradition

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To understand how Unix's design might change in the future, we can start by looking at how Unix programming style has changed over time in the past. This effort leads us directly to one of the challenges of understanding the Unix style — distinguishing between accident and essence. That is, recognizing traits that arise from transient technical circumstances versus those that are deeply tied to the central Unix design challenge — how to do modularity and abstraction right while also keeping systems transparent and simple.

This distinction can be difficult, because traits that arose as accidents have sometimes turned out to have essential utility. Consider as an example the ‘Silence is golden’ rule of Unix interface design we examined in Chapter�/a>; it began as an adaptation to slow teletypes, but continued because programs with terse output could be combined in scripts more easily. Today, in an environment where having many programs running visibly through a GUI is normal, it has a third kind of utility: silent programs don't distract or waste the user's attention.

On the other hand, some traits that once seemed essential to Unix turned out to be accidents tied to a particular set of cost ratios. For example, old-school Unix favored program designs (and minilanguages like awk(1)) that did line-at-a-time processing of an input stream or record-at-a-time processing of binary files, with any context that needed to be maintained between pieces carried by elaborate state-machine code. New-school Unix design, on the other hand, is generally happy with the assumption that a program can read its entire input into memory and thereafter randomly access it at will. Indeed, modern Unixes supply an mmap(2) call that allows the programmer to map an entire file into virtual memory and completely hides the serialization of I/O to and from disk space.

This change trades away storage economy to get simpler and more transparent code. It's an adaptation to the plunging cost of memory relative to programmer time. Many of the differences between old-school Unix designs in the 1970s and 1980s and those of the new post-1990 school can be traced to the huge shift in relative costs that today makes all machine resources several orders of magnitude cheaper relative to programmer time than they were in 1969.

Looking back, we can identify three specific technology changes that have driven significant changes in Unix design style: internetworking, bitmapped graphics displays, and the personal computer. In each case, the Unix tradition has adapted to the challenge by discarding accidents that were no longer adaptive and finding new applications for its essential ideas. Biological evolution works this way too. Evolutionary biologists have a rule: “Don't assume that historical origin specifies current utility, or vice versa”. A brief look at how Unix adapted in each of these cases may provide some clues to how Unix might adapt itself to future technology shifts that we cannot yet anticipate.

Chapter�a> described the first of these changes: the rise of internetworking, from the angle of cultural history, telling how TCP/IP brought the original Unix and ARPANET cultures together after 1980. In Chapter�a>, the material on obsolescent IPC and networking methods such as System V STREAMS hints at the many false starts, missteps, and dead ends that preoccupied Unix developers through much of the following decade. There was a good deal of confusion about protocols,[153] and about the relationship between intermachine networking and interprocess communication among processes on the same machine.

Eventually the confusion was cleared up when TCP/IP won and BSD sockets reasserted Unix's essential everything-is-a-byte-stream metaphor. It became normal to use BSD sockets for both IPC and networking, older methods for both largely fell out of use, and Unix software grew increasingly indifferent to whether communicating components were hosted on the same or different machines. The invention of the World Wide Web in 1990-1991 was the logical result.

When bitmapped graphics and the example of the Macintosh arrived in 1984 a few years after TCP/IP, they posed a rather more difficult challenge. The original GUIs from Xerox PARC and Apple were beautiful, but wired together far too many levels of the system for Unix programmers to feel comfortable with their design. The prompt response of Unix programmers was to make separation of policy from mechanism an explicit principle; the X windowing system established it by 1988. By splitting X widget sets away from the display manager that was doing low-level graphics, they created an architecture that was modular and clean in Unix terms, and one that could easily evolve better policy over time.

But that was the easy part of the problem. The hard part was deciding whether Unix ought to have a unified interface policy at all, and if so what it ought to be. Several different attempts to establish one through proprietary toolkits (like Motif) failed. Today, in 2003, GTK and Qt contend with each other for the role. While the debate on this question is not over in 2003, the persistence of different UI styles that we noted in Chapter�/a> seems telling. New-school Unix design has kept the command line, and dealt with the tension between GUI and CLI approaches by writing lots of CLI-engine/GUI-interface pairs that can be used in both styles.

The personal computer posed few major design challenges as a technology in itself. The 386 and later chips were powerful enough to give the systems designed around them cost ratios similar to those of the minicomputers, workstations, and servers on which Unix matured. The true challenge was a change in the potential market for Unix; the much lower overall price of the hardware made personal computers attractive to a vastly broader, less technically sophisticated user population.

The proprietary-Unix vendors, accustomed to the fatter margins from selling more powerful systems to sophisticated buyers, were never interested in this wider market. The first serious initiatives toward the end-user desktop came out of the open-source community and were mounted for essentially ideological reasons. As of mid-2003, market surveys indicate that Linux has reached about 4%–5% share there, closely comparable to the Apple Macintosh's.

Whether or not Linux ever does substantially better than this, the nature of the Unix community's response is already clear. We examined it in the study of Linux in Chapter�a>. It includes adopting a few technologies (such as XML) from elsewhere, and putting a lot of effort into naturalizing GUIs into the Unix world. But underneath the themed GUIs and the installation packaging, the main emphasis is still on modularity and clean code — on getting the infrastructure for serious, high-reliability computing and communications right.

The history of the large-scale desktop-focused developments like Mozilla and OpenOffice.org that were launched in the late 1990s illustrates this emphasis well. In both these cases, the most important theme in community feedback wasn't demand for new features or pressure to make a ship date — it was distaste for monster monoliths, and a general sense that these huge programs would have to be slimmed down, refactored, and carved into modules before they would be other than embarrassments.

Despite being accompanied by a great deal of innovation, the responses to all three technologies were conservative with regard to the fundamental Unix design rules — modularity, transparency, separation of policy from mechanism, and the other qualities we've tried to characterize earlier in this book. The learned response of Unix programmers, reinforced over thirty years, was to go back to first principles — to try to get more leverage out of Unix's basic abstractions of streams, namespaces, and processes in preference to layering on new ones.

 

[153] For a few years it looked like ISO's 7-layer networking standard might compete successfully with TCP/IP. It was promoted by a European standards committee politically horrified at the thought of adopting any technology birthed in the bowels of the Pentagon. Alas, their indignation exceeded their technical acuity. The result proved overcomplicated and unhelpful; see [Padlipsky] for details.

 

 

 

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