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Do One Thing

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Re: Do One Thing

#91

Post by roel_v »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #82
roel_v wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, there is a lot to be missed from the 'net, yes; but from the web? Like what? I mean, even when we're generous, 'pre-dotcom-bubble' is 'pre-2000' - the web was crap back then.

- It was much lighter; entire websites used to weight less than a single JS file today. We've increased the size of pages by an order of magnitude (and processing expense by at least two) for no real reason except laziness. - The SaaS/cloud model wasn't so popular, which means trying to lock you in by stealing your data, or doing absolutely ridiculous things like IoT does, wasn't something you saw.

But that's how it's presented, not content. Look I dislike 5mb pages with 2 paragraphs of text content as much as the next guy, but if I had to choose between that and 1000 shitty Geocities 'personal homepages' and the vast wealth of information that can be found on the internet today, I'd choose today in a heartbeat.

How can someone claim with a straight face "but the web really was a lot more fun pre-dotcom-bubble" ? Good luck trying to find anything outside of nerd subculture and physics/math/CS content (exaggeration of course, but the core is true). (of course it could be 'true' if all one cares about is nerd subculture and physics/math/CS content...)

Re: Do One Thing

#92

Post by [deleted] »

m_fayer wrote: post #38

It sounds like what he's actually arguing for is cohesion, not just simplicity. And if that's the case, I'm with him. Cohesion is achieved when the degree of complexity is determined by both domain and audience, so Photoshop's relative complexity and Pixelmator's relative simplicity are both fine - in each case the domain is satisfactorily handled for the needs of the respective audience. They're both cohesive tools.…

[deleted]

Re: Do One Thing

#93

Post by Qwertious »

turs0und wrote: post #75
astine wrote: post #16

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…

This feels like an over-simplification. Life doesn't fit into 4 quadrants, and the only thing models are guaranteed to do is be inaccurate. "One thing" and "well" are fundamentally subjective and based on a particular use-case. You have to focus on the problem(s) you're solving, and be disciplined about the scope of the problem(s) you're solving.

>the only thing models are guaranteed to do is be inaccurate.

My model of gmail is gmail. This model is 100% accurate.

Re: Do One Thing

#94

Post by Tiksi »

nostrademons wrote: post #53
dahart wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I pipe things in and out of ffmpeg, curl, convert (and the rest of imagemagick), mysql, tar, netcat, jq, etc pretty frequently, and that's all images, video, audio, applications and structured data. It seems to map quite well for all that.

Re: Do One Thing

#95

Post by gnu »

Since no one mentioned Plan 9, I thought I will mention one of the many features that makes Plan 9, one notch above Unix to make it easy in the web era.

In Plan 9, literally everything has a file abstraction. This also includes sockets. So, even shell programs can be network programs without external programs like curl or wget or anything like that. For anyone interested, look at webfs(4). You may say that this can be implemented with fuse. But having something first class, designed to operate well within the file abstraction, is very different from something that has been added as an afterthought. In some sense, the BSD folks who added sockets into Unix really screwed it up and missed the Unix philosophy altogether.

Re: Do One Thing

#96

Post by hueving »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #83
jshen wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Depends. I accept the capitalism's ability to raise resources (capital) for larger-scale projects, but generally profit motive fucks everything up. The Internet was fine until every pathetic "enterepreneur" out there smelled easy money and come to ruin it all. It happens in every industry. Capitalism creates abundance - but abundance of worst possible crap sellers can still get away with.

The Internet wasn't even accessible to the general public without capitalism motivating the creation of ISPs.

Re: Do One Thing

#97

Post by gnu »

gnu wrote: post #95

Since no one mentioned Plan 9, I thought I will mention one of the many features that makes Plan 9, one notch above Unix to make it easy in the web era. In Plan 9, literally everything has a file abstraction. This also includes sockets. So, even shell programs can be network programs without external programs like curl or wget or anything like that. For anyone interested, look at webfs(4). You may say that this can b…

Modern 'Linux' systems are full of programs that violate Unix philosophy.

cdrecord, ffmpeg, emacs, dbus, imagemagick, all modern browsers ... the list goes on and on. plumber(4) does what dbus is trying to do, with very little amount of code and text file based rules.

I see it as a missed opportunity for linux kernel and hence to the wider audience to experience a computing environment that is a joy to use.

Re: Do One Thing

#98

Post by crdoconnor »

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…

Ironically the Unix philosophy doesn't even really apply to Unix itself - it mainly just applies to GNU tools. Unix is a general purpose operating system for computers of all shapes and sizes. You can't get much more generic than that.

Re: Do One Thing

#99

Post by hollerith »

hueving wrote: post #96
TeMPOraL wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends. I accept the capitalism's ability to raise resources (capital) for larger-scale projects, but generally profit motive fucks everything up. The Internet was fine until every pathetic "enterepreneur" out there smelled easy money and come to ruin it all. It happens in every industry. Capitalism creates abundance - but abundance of worst possible crap sellers can still get away with.

The Internet wasn't even accessible to the general public without capitalism motivating the creation of ISPs.

That's true. The free market was mostly [1] absent from the research into packet switching in the 1960s, the actual deployment in 1969 of the packet-switched network that became the internet, the invention of email, FTP, the domain name system, the mailing list, newsgroups, IRC, the MMORPG (initially referred to as a multi-user domain or a MUD), the web, webmail, the blog, the RSS feed, the wiki and Wikipedia, but, yeah, starting about 1987, profit-motivated ISPs started slowly to appear that offered access to the internet to organizations and individuals.

1: I use the qualifier "mostly" because the government did farm out most research and engineering tasks to a handful of for-profit companies (Bolt Beranak Newman, the Mitre Corporation, SRI International) that specialized in governmental contracts.

Re: Do One Thing

#100

Post by mintplant »

jdc wrote: post #8
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…

Fill your moats.

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