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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Part of my comment was about his statement that the Unix philosophy is something of the past, which is false. Parts of the rest of my comment dealt with what he said about the plethora of "one size fits all" tools people are using now instead of the simple tools. Can you not make the connection?
The OP was talking about web apps. What do Makefiles and npm have to with Evernote or Dropbox?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Part of my comment was about his statement that the Unix philosophy is something of the past, which is false. Parts of the rest of my comment dealt with what he said about the plethora of "one size fits all" tools people are using now instead of the simple tools. Can you not make the connection?
The OP was talking about web apps. What do Makefiles and npm have to with Evernote or Dropbox?
People mean a lot of things when they say "one thing". "Do one thing" can mean "replace all occurrences of one string with another". Or it could mean "browse the web", which of course isn't really one thing but a thousand things.
People mean a lot of things when they say "one thing". "Do one thing" can mean "replace all occurrences of one string with another". Or it could mean "browse the web", which of course isn't really one thing but a thousand things.
I've always wondered how Emacs fits with Unix philosophy? With it you can replace strings AND browse the web, but also play games, do file management, email, chat, etc...
tar cvf - FILE-LIST | gzip -c > FILE.tar.gz
People mean a lot of things when they say "one thing". "Do one thing" can mean "replace all occurrences of one string with another". Or it could mean "browse the web", which of course isn't really one thing but a thousand things.
I've always wondered how Emacs fits with Unix philosophy? With it you can replace strings AND browse the web, but also play games, do file management, email, chat, etc...
(Actually, most of the individual applications you're thinking about are these days provided through an Emacs package system.)
I'm definitely guilty of holding onto a philosophy and thinking it applies universally, so I can't blame people that hold onto the Unix philosophy extremely strongly. But I can't help but think that the world requires a hell of a lot more pragmatism than the Unix philosophy can provide. The first problem I see is that "One Thing" is really subjective. Some people might see Postgres as doing one thing really well (It…
I also felt like there was a lack of imagination in some of the comments. Poo-pooing images in notes as related selfies is nice hyperbole, but I used it all of the time for System Diagrams and other bits that are so much easier to draw on a large white board than to transcribe or even draw on a digital canvas.
I DO wish there was a easier way to donors than just 1 thing with IFTT, though. Perhaps that is in the cards someday.
I agree on the face of things, but what the web is missing from the unix philosophy is an equivalent to |. Without the ability to string multiple, focused tools together even tools that did one thing well(i.e., Evernote) will continue to add features until it does a bunch of things meh.
On the web, "|" (pipe) means integration with other services, and it comes with all the associated trials and tribulations. To make web pipes work, just to even get started, you first have to solve authentication and data format/transfer standards. Those things are a big pain, its not surprising that most services attempt to provide the service directly.
Unix pipes were designed for builders, technical people who understand the structure of the data they're piping around. Posix commands come in a minimum standardized set that work well together, and while there are some commands here and there to pipe structured and/or binary data, the core set and what most people use pipes on and love pipes for is plain text.
The internet just doesn't have the same foundation or purpose or user base, its usage is not centered around technical people building pipelines, so its not surprising that web services by and large haven't flocked to meet a unix analogy -- its technically much harder to do than writing unix, and its not even clear its even close to a useful thing to do, for most people.