71–80 of 136 posts
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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?
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…
> but its not because it did more than one thing, it is because it didn't do them well. In general I agree with your line of thinking, but I will nitpick on this particular sentence (or the way it's phrased) and say: the whole idea of doing only one thing is that if you try to do more than one thing, you will definitely not do them all well. I do agree with you though. The "many things" that postgresql does are all a…
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.
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Because it's really convenient to be able to make a note on your phone or tablet, then access it and make additional post-meeting notes shortly thereafter, on a laptop, all in the same interface (so you have the same features, or at least a set of common features). That's just one, assuming you never want formatting, tables, pictures, etc.
Maybe we need some sort of unix on the web.
On the 'do one thing and do it well' issue, there seem to be two spectrums: 1. suitability of a tool to multiple tasks 2. number of features a tool has This makes for sort of a field with four quadrants: 1. simple but flexible tools 2. complex and featureful tools 3. specialized but simple tools, 4. highly specialized and highly featureful tools So take a tool like grep and it clearly belongs in the first quadrant. Y…
> That philosophy was great, but hasn’t survived into the Web age. The modern "web operating system" is Amazon's AWS, and I'd argue that the unix philosophy survived surprisingly well there. AWS has many services; each one does a specific job really well, and they interoperate very well together. That's the very embodiment of the unix philosophy.
Also software engineering sounds unglamorous today and research in the field seems to have stalled. And therefore the craving for the simplicity of the Unix philosophy. Not that the Unix way of working actually solves the problems posed by software complexity, it just asks us to avoid complexity.
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Absolutely! And just follow that to logical conclusions, to me it seems to answer the question of why we don't have it, right? 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 surpris…
The other big factor is that pipes only work because of the power of plain text. The output of every UNIX command is ASCII text, and most of the time, it's ASCII text with columns delimited by \t and rows delimited by \n. And there are command-line utilities like awk, cut, sed, & xargs for parsing & rearranging that text, and funneling it into formats that other commands understand. The web has a variety of other con…
Also: ditch plaintext for structured data and suddenly handling of other content becomes much, much easier, and they map perfectly to this model.
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Wat. You want to go back to pre-1995, the Netscape IPO?
I'd date the actual, functional takeover somewhat later than that, but the web really was a lot more fun pre-dotcom-bubble. I'm not sure I would say I want to go back to it, exactly, but there sure is a lot that I miss.
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Why use a web app to take notes when one has vi or emacs?
Because it's really convenient to be able to make a note on your phone or tablet, then access it and make additional post-meeting notes shortly thereafter, on a laptop, all in the same interface (so you have the same features, or at least a set of common features). That's just one, assuming you never want formatting, tables, pictures, etc.
[0] - http://orgmode.org/