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From: jpeek@jpeek.com (Jerry Peek)
Subject: [TUHS] Mention TUHS in Linux Magazine (US)?
Date: Sat, 30 Apr 2005 11:28:51 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <14431.1114885731@jpeek.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <200504301931.53182.wes.parish@paradise.net.nz>

On 30 April 2005 at 19:31, Wesley Parish <wes.parish at paradise.net.nz> wrote:
> And, FWIW, in one of the few GNUs Bulletins I actually have received, courtesy
> of the FSF, RMS (I think) was advising that with the dropping price in
> memory, GNU hackers could do without worrying about memory size, when it came
> to replicating Unix utilities..

That's been on my mind as I thought back to my days on VAXen
with 100 users logged on and a load average of 30.  Back then,
efficient programming was so very important.  Now, when the GNU
"cp" has more than 20 options -- and some of those with several
possible arguments -- one side of me thinks how bloated the GNU
utilities seem.  But, on the other hand, one of the things I'm
doing in this series of columns is to compare "how we used to
do it" vs. the usefulness of some of the new features.  For
instance, back then we could copy a directory tree recursively
with "tar" or "find", carefully handling devices and etc. along
the way.  Now we can do the same thing by typing a cp command
with a couple of options.  With powerful machines on our desks,
which sort of "efficiency" do we want these days?

I'm not trying to answer that question!  I'm trying to show
things in a balanced way and leave it to the reader to decide.
This has been debated and discussed so much over the years
that I can't shed any new light on it.  I just want readers to
keep it in mind, think about where we've been and where we are.

Jerry


  parent reply	other threads:[~2005-04-30 18:28 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 14+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2005-04-29 17:59 Carl Lowenstein
2005-04-29 19:10 ` Jerry Peek
2005-04-30  1:19   ` Kurt Wall
2005-04-30  7:31 ` Wesley Parish
2005-04-30 11:35   ` Tim Shoppa
2005-04-30 18:28   ` Jerry Peek [this message]
2005-05-01  8:21     ` Wesley Parish
2005-05-09  8:41       ` [TUHS] Sad news from IBM J. R. Valverde
     [not found] <200504290913.j3T9DdGA016881@skeeve.com>
2005-04-29 10:05 ` [TUHS] Mention TUHS in Linux Magazine (US)? Warren Toomey
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2005-04-28 16:50 Jerry Peek
2005-04-29  1:55 ` Tim Newsham
2005-04-29  7:04 ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2005-04-29  9:02   ` Warren Toomey
2005-04-29 16:20     ` Jerry Peek

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