From: Alexis <flexibeast@gmail.com>
To: The Unix Heritage Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: [TUHS] Re: [COFF] Re: On Bloat and the Idea of Small Specialized Tools
Date: Mon, 13 May 2024 12:33:55 +1000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <87y18ebfu4.fsf@gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAP2nic1zeJG7tkDbUnEMjxUG_TmYLwCQJhfS6Yt+E1w5s2s4cw@mail.gmail.com> (Adam Thornton's message of "Sun, 12 May 2024 12:34:20 -0700")
> On Sat, May 11, 2024 at 2:35 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
> wrote:
>
> So while some of us old farts might be bemoaning the death of
> the
> Unix
> philosophy, perhaps part of the reality is that the Unix
> philosophy
> were ideal for a simpler time, but might not be as good of a fit
> today
Hm .... i guess it might depend on the specific use-case(s)
involved?
At one point i realised that a primary reason i enjoy using *n*x
systems is that they're fundamentally
_text-oriented_. (Unsurprisingly, of course, given the context in
which Unix was developed.) i spend a lot of my time interacting
and working with text, and *n*x systems provide me with many
useful tools for this. Quoting the old "UNIX As Literature" piece,
https://theody.net/elements.html:
"[T]he most recurrent complaint was that [Unix] was too
text-oriented. People really hated the command line, with all the
utilities, obscure flags, and arguments they had to memorize. They
hated all the typing. One mislaid character and you had to start
over. Interestingly, this complaint came most often from users of
the GUI-laden Macintosh or Windows platforms. ...
"[A] suspiciously high proportion of my UNIX colleagues had
already developed, in some prior career, a comfort and fluency
with text and printed words. ...
"With UNIX, text — on the command line, STDIN, STDOUT, STDERR — is
the primary interface mechanism: UNIX system utilities are a sort
of Lego construction set for word-smiths. Pipes and filters
connect one utility to the next, text flows invisibly
between. Working with a shell, awk/lex derivatives, or the utility
set is literally a word dance."
Perl, with its pervasive regex-based functionality and extensive
Unicode support, fits neatly into this. i find regexes an
_incredibly_ powerful tool for working with text, whether via
Perl, sed, awk, or whatever. But my experience is that many people
treat regexes as an anathema, with Zawinski's "Now you have two
problems" regularly trotted out as a thought-terminating
cliché. Sure, regexes can, and do, get used where they shouldn't
be[a]; that doesn't mean the baby should be thrown out with the
bathwater.
But if one is only working with text under sufferance, trying to
avoid it via substantially more graphically-oriented environments,
the text-based "Unix philosophy" and the tools associated with it
might feel (and actually be) much less appropriate and
useful. Fair enough. The Unix construction set will still be there
for those of us who find them very appropriate and tremendously
useful.
Alexis.
[a] It seems unlikely that anyone on this list hasn't already seen
this, but just in case:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454
i'm looking forward to that comment sending OpenAI over the
Mountains of Madness.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2024-05-13 2:34 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 14+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2024-05-10 16:36 [TUHS] " Clem Cole
[not found] ` <CAGg_6+Ov6hYTxQ5M-hEBoOiUQ0UVRP0V+aVi0STKAALLDUGY7g@mail.gmail.com>
[not found] ` <CAEoi9W7FbGZFhiddHWWqdivGFfgFAj9nsUApomswfP56rqTMpQ@mail.gmail.com>
[not found] ` <20240511213532.GB8330@mit.edu>
2024-05-12 19:34 ` [TUHS] Re: [COFF] " Adam Thornton
2024-05-12 19:47 ` Larry McVoy
2024-05-12 20:13 ` [TUHS] Re: forking, " John Levine
2024-05-12 22:56 ` Dan Cross
2024-05-12 23:34 ` Larry McVoy
2024-05-13 1:34 ` Dave Horsfall
2024-05-13 13:21 ` Larry McVoy
2024-05-13 3:29 ` Andrew Warkentin
2024-05-12 20:43 ` [TUHS] " Dave Horsfall
2024-05-13 2:33 ` Alexis [this message]
2024-05-13 2:57 ` Warner Losh
2024-05-13 5:23 ` markus schnalke
2024-05-13 6:18 ` Andrew Warkentin
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