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Author: Rick Moen
Date:  
To: dng
Subject: Re: [DNG] fvwm
I meant to include this:

[UNIX-HATER's Handbook:]

> Said volume, a flawed minor classic of the rant genre, has always had
> fans in Unixdom, including yr. present correspondent. It's a
> compilation of postings to the old (long-gone, I think) mailing list
> UNIX-HATERS, mostly sent by disgruntled devotees of Symbolics, Inc.
> LISP Machines and a few Mac-heads uncharacteristically able to use their
> keyboards. ;-> (In other words, the critiques are all rather ancient
> in 2017.)


Eric Raymond and his blog readership had a retrospective look at this
book in 2008. (Like Eric, I have a well-worn copy of the IDG Press
trade paperback.) http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=538

Eric found that some chapters' critiques still had some currency. Most
of them took aim at long-irrelevant targets, like the chapter on
sendmail and the chapter on Unix support for physical terminals. He
views Don Hopkins's chapter about X11 to be mixed bag. I'm amused to
note that Eric makes the same comment I did, about the missed
opportunity when Sun Microsystems refused to open-source NeWS with the
result that everyone stopped using it.

The chapter ranting about infelicities of scripting languages fell
victim to the appearance of Perl and Python, likewise the chapter about
programming tools generally.

Anyway, worth reading (both the book and Eric's retrospectie critique).