Inappropiate "BUGS" Sections

[Andrew P. Mullhaupt]

In article <7962 at tank.uchicago.edu>, goer at sophist.uucp (Richard Goerwitz) writes:
> Sorry, SCO Xenix (and I'll bet SCO Unix as well) doesn't have a "bugs"
> section in its manuals.  They call it "comments" or the like.  Xenix
> is probably the most popular Unix variant ever to have hit the market.
> It does seem a bit childish to, in effect, censor the word "bugs" from
> manual pages.  The statement that the "suit and tie" straitjacket will
> never win out, however, just isn't true.  The suits and ties invariably
> get control of any situation they find it useful to control :-(.  It's
> a sad by-product of our economic system.

SCO UNIX System V/386 r3.2 does not have a 'BUGS' section for its
entries, (as far as I can tell). The man page for units is made up
of sections called: Name, Syntax, Description, and Files. It is
clear and sensibly written, and gives no disclaimer about exchange
rates. (Although Morgan Stanley is not likely to base financial plans
on the 1.7187 dollars/pound conversion it contains...)

I think there is a bit of confusion about people's tailors and their
ideologies. I was a long hair math professor and strenuously objected
to the BSD 4.2 man pages (and lots else about that calamity) and
now I work for an investment firm (still have the long hair, but do
wear suits) and have the same ideas about man pages. In the same
department as I work, there are some UNIX guru types, and they all
wear suits, have long or short hair according to taste, but most of
them think BSD man pages are cool. Most of them wear better suits than I do. 
We all work for Morgan Stanley. (Can't get more Wall Street than that.)
So what's the point?

There are several types of programmers in the UNIX environment. Some,
like myself, are programmers by dint of skill in another professional
field - (numerical analysis, algorithmic complexity and applied math
in my case) - and some are UNIX/C natives. The natives find all the
little quirks familiar and no big deal, and appreciate the odd bit of
askance humor in the man pages. The OS/language itinerants find all
matters of operating system obstuctional, and language inadequate,
and can't seem to understand what was so sensibly constructed in 
OS-A/Lang-I is so idiotically tied to history in OS-B/LANG-II. 

UNIX/C natives are not particularly more or less sensitive to the
observations of the itinerants than are say the MVS/APL2 natives,
or the VMS/Pascal natives, or the NOS/FORTRAN natives, etc., (at
least in my experience) but they are somewhat more entrenched in
the condenscending attitude that theirs is the most advanced world
with the best stuff and no need to think about incorporating the
other world's better ideas into their future. Well, every itinerant
knows full well that what's hot today is just that... hot today.
Tomorrow will bring another OS and another language. The itinerants
will move on, and some of the natives will, too. Lots of the natives
will continue to fight the battles that their OS or language already
won, and this rear guard action is the source of the worst bigots.

Personally, I can see that the past six years have been good to 
UNIX. It used to be a rickety monolingual child with dreadful bugs,
but now it's graduated to being a second-rate operating system, like
everything else. (I ain't seen a first-rate OS yet...) C has grown into
a definite language, but by finalizing some of it's more painful
mistakes. It'll stick around like FORTRAN, but I'll look elsewhere
for the future. UNIX/C will have it's day, but I'll be surprised if
C's "market share" isn't seriously threatened by languages which
benefit from more modern thinking in the next five years.


Later,
Andrew Mullhaupt