Re: [9fans] insularity

[Noah Evans <noah.evans@cwru.edu>]

Exactly(if I understand you right). Everything that's been added on since then is just a way of avoiding the right way of doing things(i.e. coming up with a way of describing the problem, then adding that idiom to your vocabulary). But then again, I'm just quoting the gospel of  "software tools". 

Sociologists have studied this process quite a bit. A small group of talented people come up with something very interesting and elegant, like a religion or clothing style, and then as it spreads and diffuses the meme begins to mutate and simplify. Pretty soon it ossifies and barely even resembles the original. I wish I had paid more attention when my professor was discussing it. 

Noah

----- Original Message -----
From: ron minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov>
Date: Wednesday, March 17, 2004 12:24 pm
Subject: Re: [9fans] insularity

> On Wed, 17 Mar 2004, Noah Evans wrote:
> 
> > A really bad habit of mine is relying on the history to do things,
> > Rather than spend the initial cost of effort to write a shell 
> function> and remember it, I'm constantly using Bash's tab 
> completion and history
> > functions to avoid having to expend any effort organizing my 
> patterns of
> > use and solving problems. Everything I do is an ad hoc solution.
> 
> there's some real humor here, in some sense, as this is what we 
> did in the 
> 70s with Unix V6, before stuff like history. Some things have come 
> full 
> circle.
> 
> ron
> 
>