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Do One Thing

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Re: Do One Thing

#61

Post by ZenoArrow »

ybx wrote: post #45
ZenoArrow wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this context... "specialized" = Do one thing "flexible" = and do it well. That said, the key ingredient of the Unix philosophy that is missing isn't specialised, flexible tools, it's composability of those tools. Imagine if you couldn't pipe grep output to another program, wouldn't it be a lot less useful? I'd say so. There are ways we can get around this, but they would require a fair amount of development time.…

How does flexible mean do it well? "Do it well" is so vague of a saying that it really could mean any of those things, whether it be flexibility, or simplicity, or etc.

As I said, in this context, it means flexibility, but that flexibility must be tempered with composibility.

Think about how programs become bloated. What helps the core Unix command line tools avoid this fate?

Re: Do One Thing

#62

Post by dendory »

gopowerranger wrote: post #3

"That philosophy was great, but hasn’t survived into the Web age." As one who still writes shell scripts for my work that do such a thing, and programs, too, I disagree as every Unix and BSD coder I know still does these things. It still serves us very well; far better than the glut of so-called package managers that pretend they can do better than 'make'. I chalk a large portion of this up to those creating web page…

Ironically, just this week I had several cases of attempting to install Python modules with pip, and every error that came up had to do with compiling parts. Then I used apt-get to install binary packages and they all installed just fine, in 1/10 the time.

Re: Do One Thing

#64

Post by [deleted] »

saosebastiao wrote: post #20

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…

[deleted]

Re: Do One Thing

#65

Post by doomrobo »

bigethan wrote: post #5

I had two thoughts while reading this. 1 - The need for the web to be profitable in some way makes 'single tools' hard to build. You have to grow users, add features, etc, etc. So even if you have an API or something useful it likely won't scale economically. Unless it's government supported or behind a foundation of some sort. The Twitter API comes to mind here. 2 - This is tricky because for the web to meet the UNI…

I think Tarsnap is an apt counterexample to your first point. It has a stable API, a very very conservative feature set, and a stable customer base.

Re: Do One Thing

#66

Post by ryandrake »

ExcilSploft wrote: post #42
jonstokes wrote: post #2

I would like to propose a "cloud" addendum to Zawinski's law, which states that "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can". My addendum is: "Every cloud app expands to the point where it can host group chat. Those apps which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can." I think it's also possible that I may have to augment the ad…

I suggest it is package manager. Everything has it's own little little plugin management tools, for retrieving, installing etc.

If you're NOT writing a web browser, and the little voice in your head says something like "I know! I'll solve that by writing a plug-in system and let other developers write to my API, and all their code will run in a sandbox, and I'll write a virtual filesystem for them to use, and I'll provide an installation/uninstallation system, and maybe a debugger..."

STOP

Get up and walk away from the keyboard for a bit. Maybe take a refreshing shower. Clear your head and let yourself think this through a bit. You'll come to the right conclusion. Now go back to your keyboard and work on something that delivers value for your customers :)

Re: Do One Thing

#68

Post by J_Darnley »

ainar-g wrote: post #33
jobu wrote: post #27

There is some merit to "doing one thing well", but taken to the extreme it can be horrible in a different way: tar cvf - FILE-LIST | gzip -c > FILE.tar.gz ( https://xkcd.com/1168/ )

Rob in that comic clearly hasn't used Unix long enough to know about the Arnold mnemonic[1]. [1] http://i.imgur.com/Vf0An8J.png

What kind of tar are you both using that doesn't detect the compression type? tar -xf FILE is fine.

Re: Do One Thing

#69

Post by marssaxman »

jshen wrote: post #13
bigethan wrote: post #5

I had two thoughts while reading this. 1 - The need for the web to be profitable in some way makes 'single tools' hard to build. You have to grow users, add features, etc, etc. So even if you have an API or something useful it likely won't scale economically. Unless it's government supported or behind a foundation of some sort. The Twitter API comes to mind here. 2 - This is tricky because for the web to meet the UNI…

> Once again, capitalism ruins everything fun And creates everything fun.

Not so sure about that - the web has become a lot less fun since capitalism took it over.

Re: Do One Thing

#70

Post by drumdance »

marssaxman wrote: post #69
jshen wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once again, capitalism ruins everything fun And creates everything fun.

Not so sure about that - the web has become a lot less fun since capitalism took it over.

Wat. You want to go back to pre-1995, the Netscape IPO?
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