Progress and Practice

Read Again: The Art of UNIX Programming by Eric S. Raymond

In a moment of nostalgia, I picked up my copy of “The Art of UNIX Programming” by Eric S. Raymond (esr) and flipped through it again. It’s a book I’ve had since when it came out in 2004, and that I’ve always been quite fond of. I was looking forward to a review of “the way the future was”, as viewed from the early 2000s. So, it came as a bit of a surprise to me to find that the book seems to have aged rather poorly.

Unix Tools Today

I learned Unix almost 30 years ago, while attending graduate school in the early 90s, from a now long-obsolete book entitled “Unix for the Impatient”.

Some of the tools and commands I learned back then have long since become irrelevant (ftp, telnet, cvs, biff — remember biff?). Others, although long in the tooth, continue to serve me well every day (emacs, tcsh, cc). And yet a third group seems to be more important than ever (such as tar, which is the basis for Docker images).

How Has Software Development Changed?

A survey published by O’Reilly regarding the state of the tech industry made me reflect how the field has changed since the dot-com boom (and bust) — that is, in the last 20 years, which really constitute the Internet Age and the Modern Software Era so far.