Excerpted from Eric S. Raymond's The Unix Hater’s Handbook, Reconsidered (2008)[http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=538]:
This chapter begins unfortunately, with complaints about X’s performance and memory usage that seem rather quaint when comparing it to the applications of 14 years later. It continues with a fling at the sparseness of X applications circa 1990 which is unintentionally funny when read from within evince on a Linux desktop also hosting the Emacs instance I’m writing in, a toolbar with about a dozen applets on it, and a Web browser.
I judge that the authors’ rejection of mechanism/policy separation as a guiding principle of X was foundationally mistaken. I argued in The Art of Unix Programming that this principle gives X an ability to adapt to new technologies and new thinking about UI that no competitor has ever matched. I still think that’s true.
But not all the feces flung in this chapter is misdirected; Motif really did suck pretty badly, it’s a good thing it’s dead. ICCCM is about as horrible as the authors describe, but that’s hard to notice these days because modern toolkits and window managers do a pretty good job of hiding the ugliness from applications.
Though it’s not explicitly credited, I’m fairly sure most of this chapter was written by Don Hopkins. Don is a wizard hacker and a good man who got caught on the wrong side of history, investing a lot of effort in Sun’s NeWS just before it got steamrollered by X, and this chapter is best read as the same bitter lament for NeWS I heard from him face to face in the late 1980s.
Don may have been right, architecturally speaking. But X did not win by accident; it clobbered NeWS essentially because it was open source while NeWS was not. In the 20 years after 1987 that meant enough people put in enough work that X got un-broken, notably when Keith Packard came back after 2001 and completely rewrote the rendering core. The nasty resources system is pretty much bypassed by modern toolkits. X-extension hell and the device portability problems the authors were so aggrieved by turned out to be a temporary phenomenon while people were still working on understanding the 2D-graphics problem space.
That having been said, Olin Shivers’s rant about xauth is still pretty funny and I’m glad I haven’t had to use it in years.
I judge that the authors’ rejection of mechanism/policy separation as a guiding principle of X was foundationally mistaken. I argued in The Art of Unix Programming that this principle gives X an ability to adapt to new technologies and new thinking about UI that no competitor has ever matched. I still think that’s true.
But not all the feces flung in this chapter is misdirected; Motif really did suck pretty badly, it’s a good thing it’s dead. ICCCM is about as horrible as the authors describe, but that’s hard to notice these days because modern toolkits and window managers do a pretty good job of hiding the ugliness from applications.
Though it’s not explicitly credited, I’m fairly sure most of this chapter was written by Don Hopkins. Don is a wizard hacker and a good man who got caught on the wrong side of history, investing a lot of effort in Sun’s NeWS just before it got steamrollered by X, and this chapter is best read as the same bitter lament for NeWS I heard from him face to face in the late 1980s.
Don may have been right, architecturally speaking. But X did not win by accident; it clobbered NeWS essentially because it was open source while NeWS was not. In the 20 years after 1987 that meant enough people put in enough work that X got un-broken, notably when Keith Packard came back after 2001 and completely rewrote the rendering core. The nasty resources system is pretty much bypassed by modern toolkits. X-extension hell and the device portability problems the authors were so aggrieved by turned out to be a temporary phenomenon while people were still working on understanding the 2D-graphics problem space.
That having been said, Olin Shivers’s rant about xauth is still pretty funny and I’m glad I haven’t had to use it in years.