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A short extract of Neal Stephenson's seminal essay has been doing the rounds on HackerNews.
OK, fine, so let's go with it.
Since my impression is that HN people are [a] xNix fans [b] often quite young therefore [c] have little exposure to other OSes, let me try to unpack what Stephenson was getting at, in context.
The Hole Hawg is a dangerous and overpowered tool for most non-professionals. It is big and heavy. It can take on big tough jobs with ease, but its size and its brute power mean that it is not suitable for precision work. It has relatively few safety features, so that if used inexpertly, it will hurt its operator.
DIY stores are full of smaller, much less powerful tools. This is for good reasons:
The Hole Hawg, as described, is a clumsy tool that needs things attached to it in order to be used, and even then, you need to know the right way or it will hurt you.
Compare with a domestic drill with a pistol grip that is ready to use out of its case. Modern ones are cordless, increasing their convenience.
One is a tool for someone building a house; the other is a better tool for someone living in that house.
That's the drill part.
Now, let's discuss the OSes talked about in the rest of the 1999 piece from which that's a clipping [PDF].
There are:
He points out that MacOS 9 is as pretty, friendly, and comprehensible as OSes get, but it doesn't multitask well, it is not very stable, and when a program crashes, your entire computer probably goes with it.
He points out that Windows is overpriced, performs poorly, and is not the best option for anyone – but that everyone runs it and most people just conform with what the mainstream does.
He praises BeOS very highly, which was 100% justified at the time: it was faster than anything else, by a large margin. It has superb multimedia support and integration, better than anything else at the time. It was standards-compliant but not held back by it. For its time, it has a supermodern OS, eliminating tonnes of legacy cruft.
But it didn't have many apps so it was mainly for people in narrow niches, such as music production or maybe video editing.
It was manifestly the future, though. But we're living in the future and it wasn't. This was 23 years ago, nearly a quarter of a century, before KDE and GNOME, before Windows XP, before Mac OS X. You need to know that.
What Unix people interpret as praise here is in fact criticism.
That Unix is very unfriendly and can easily hurt its user. (Think `rm -rf /` here.)
That Unix has a great deal of raw power but maybe more than most people need.
That Unix is, frankly, kinda ugly, and only someone who doesn't care about appearances would choose it.
That something of this brute power is not suitable for fine precision work. (Which it still mostly isn't -- Mac OS X is Unix, tuned and polished, and that's what the creative pros use now.)
Here's a response from 17 years ago.
OK, fine, so let's go with it.
Since my impression is that HN people are [a] xNix fans [b] often quite young therefore [c] have little exposure to other OSes, let me try to unpack what Stephenson was getting at, in context.
The Hole Hawg is a dangerous and overpowered tool for most non-professionals. It is big and heavy. It can take on big tough jobs with ease, but its size and its brute power mean that it is not suitable for precision work. It has relatively few safety features, so that if used inexpertly, it will hurt its operator.
DIY stores are full of smaller, much less powerful tools. This is for good reasons:
- because for non-professional users, those smaller, less-powerful tools are much safer. A company which sells a tool to untrained users which tends to maim or kill them will go out of business.
- because smaller, less-powerful tools are better for smaller jobs, that a non-professional might undertake, such as hanging a picture, or putting up some shelves.
- professionals know to use the right tool for the job. Surgeons do not operate with chainsaws (even though they were invented for surgery). Carpenters do not use axes.
The Hole Hawg, as described, is a clumsy tool that needs things attached to it in order to be used, and even then, you need to know the right way or it will hurt you.
Compare with a domestic drill with a pistol grip that is ready to use out of its case. Modern ones are cordless, increasing their convenience.
One is a tool for someone building a house; the other is a better tool for someone living in that house.
That's the drill part.
Now, let's discuss the OSes talked about in the rest of the 1999 piece from which that's a clipping [PDF].
There are:
- Linux, before KDE, with no free complete desktop environments yet;
- Windows, meaning Windows 98SE or NT 4;
- Classic MacOS – version 9;
- BeOS.
He points out that MacOS 9 is as pretty, friendly, and comprehensible as OSes get, but it doesn't multitask well, it is not very stable, and when a program crashes, your entire computer probably goes with it.
He points out that Windows is overpriced, performs poorly, and is not the best option for anyone – but that everyone runs it and most people just conform with what the mainstream does.
He praises BeOS very highly, which was 100% justified at the time: it was faster than anything else, by a large margin. It has superb multimedia support and integration, better than anything else at the time. It was standards-compliant but not held back by it. For its time, it has a supermodern OS, eliminating tonnes of legacy cruft.
But it didn't have many apps so it was mainly for people in narrow niches, such as music production or maybe video editing.
It was manifestly the future, though. But we're living in the future and it wasn't. This was 23 years ago, nearly a quarter of a century, before KDE and GNOME, before Windows XP, before Mac OS X. You need to know that.
What Unix people interpret as praise here is in fact criticism.
That Unix is very unfriendly and can easily hurt its user. (Think `rm -rf /` here.)
That Unix has a great deal of raw power but maybe more than most people need.
That Unix is, frankly, kinda ugly, and only someone who doesn't care about appearances would choose it.
That something of this brute power is not suitable for fine precision work. (Which it still mostly isn't -- Mac OS X is Unix, tuned and polished, and that's what the creative pros use now.)
Here's a response from 17 years ago.
