Unix Programming - What Unix Gets Right - The Lessons of Unix Can Be Applied Elsewhere

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The Art of Unix Programming
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Unix Programming - What Unix Gets Right - The Lessons of Unix Can Be Applied Elsewhere

The Lessons of Unix Can Be Applied Elsewhere

Unix programmers have accumulated decades of experience while pioneering operating-system features we now take for granted. Even non-Unix programmers can benefit from studying that Unix experience. Because Unix makes it relatively easy to apply good design principles and development methods, it is an excellent place to learn them.

Other operating systems generally make good practice rather more difficult, but even so some of the Unix culture's lessons can transfer. Much Unix code (including all its filters, its major scripting languages , and many of its code generators) will port directly to any operating system supporting ANSI C (for the excellent reason that C itself was a Unix invention and the ANSI C library embodies a substantial chunk of Unix's services!).

^[7] Other operating systems have generally copied or cloned Unix TCP/IP implementations. It is their loss that they have not generally adopted the robust tradition of peer review that goes with it, exemplified by documents like RFC 1025 (TCP and IP Bake Off).

^[8]This was originally said of the IBM MVS TSO facility by Stephen C. Johnson, perhaps better known as the author of yacc.

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The Art of Unix Programming
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