The tools of the gods

Today at SAW we are not going to talk about security but about religion. About the true religion, the good one: about Unix. And about its gods: Kernighan, Ritchie, Thompson … we could cite a few. And about the tools that, in the seventies, these gods sent to us poor mortals, like the manna fallen from heaven for the chosen people.

The thing is that these gods created a real operating system, with some technically wonderful tools and a very simple philosophy: simple capabilities that combined make complex tasks. Perfection. Life is Unix running a script. More than forty years have gone by and we, poor mortals who were the chosen people, what have we done all this time? Trying to dishonor that divine legacy with artificial and useless layers (“of abstraction”, they call them, to try to make sense of them) that introduce two unnecessary problems in any “modern” technological environment: complexity, and therefore probability of error, and slowness.

Exemplary is the “true” executable, in line with the story recently commented by Rob Pike on Twitter:


$ >mytrue;chmod +x mytrue
$ ./mytrue
$ echo $?
0
$

A program whose only purpose is to always return 0. An empty executable. EMPTY. There can be nothing simpler that works, and has been for forty years … well, that’s where we mortals come in. Year 2018:

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