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March 24, 2005
Hacks
Speaking of things in the eye of the beholder, from a certain angle all of UNIX is a series of hacks, including the stuff that built up atop it. What makes it worthwhile is that what's left over in that kind of system has been stressed and ground down by users sharing the culture of the hack, once explained metaphorically as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
The difficulty when you first come to the system is that you want to impose on it. You decide you shouldn't have to learn vi for example because it seems so archaic and user-feindlich. You continue to feel comfortable with files not based on text. You think, "I just want to use this, not have to understand it." You use other people's configuration files as is.
Later on you finally decide you need to swallow your pride and learn some vi, a bit of scripting and programming. You still run X, but you have more terminals open than anything else. You see both simple and hard looking problems as not understood yet. Other people start interrupting you for help, and you notice how little you know, but how little difference that makes, too.
My father-in-law, Michel, doesn't use UNIX as far as I know. He has the idea, however. Last time he came to visit he ran out of things to do, so he took an old washing machine apart to look for salvageable spare parts. I wonder how much stuff he would've accumulated in his home dir.
Posted by Mark at March 24, 2005 08:53 PM