From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: ches@cheswick.com (William Cheswick)
Date: Sun, 7 May 2017 14:50:52 -0400
Subject: [TUHS] Discuss of style and design of computer programs from a
 user standpoint
In-Reply-To: <201705071819.v47IJ24H002013@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU>
References: <201705071819.v47IJ24H002013@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU>
Message-ID: <5D559802-6D6E-4668-9CA5-141B071BC535@cheswick.com>


> On 7May 2017, at 2:19 PM, Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> 
> Not genius. Experience.

It’s the pipe that was genius.  When I first heard the idea, I thought it was preposterous. My
programs’ outputs were designed for the line printer, with carriage control characters.  How
could this idea be useful?

These tools are powerful--I co-founded a company out of network probe software mostly designed
around filters.   And it scales beautifully to multi-core computing.  I had movie visualization software
suddenly nearly double in speed one day.  They had doubled the number of CPUs in the ferric cluster.

My favorite filter:  the unsort (or scramble) command.  
Honeyman’s “idiom” command:
sort | uniq -c | sort -rn