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For the Love of Pipes

blog.jessfraz.com

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Re: For the Love of Pipes

#51

Post by mothsonasloth »

[Quote]

The Unix philosophy is documented by Doug McIlroy as:

    Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new “features”.

    Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don’t clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don’t insist on interactive input.

    Design and build software, even operating systems, to be tried early, ideally within weeks. Don’t hesitate to throw away the clumsy parts and rebuild them.

    Use tools in preference to unskilled help to lighten a programming task, even if you have to detour to build the tools and expect to throw some of them out after you’ve finished using them.
I really like the last two, if you can do them in development then you are then you have a great dev culture

Re: For the Love of Pipes

#52

Post by diggan »

benj111 wrote: post #10

Why isn't the pipe a construct that has caught on in 'proper' languages?

Clojure has something that you could call a pipe almost. `->` passes the output from one form to the next one.

This example has a nested hash map where we try to get the "You got me!" string.

We can either use `:a` (keyword) as a function to get the value. Then we have to nest the function calls a bit unnaturally.

Or we can use the thread-first macro `->`, which is basically a unix pipe.

   user=> (def res {:a {:b {:c "You got me!"}}})
   #'user/res
   
   user=> res
   {:a {:b {:c "You got me!"}}}
   
   user=> (:c (:b (:a res)))
   "You got me!"
   
   user=> (-> res :a :b :c)
   "You got me!"
Thinking about it, Clojure advocates having small functions (similar to unix's "small programs / do one thing well") that you compose together to build bigger things.

Re: For the Love of Pipes

#53

Post by Waterluvian »

mothsonasloth wrote: post #51

[Quote] The Unix philosophy is documented by Doug McIlroy as: Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new “features”. Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don’t clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don’t insist on interactive input.…

The last one is especially interesting to me these days. On a macro scale it sure sounds a whole lot like the robot revolution taking unskilled jobs.

But of course that's probably not the author's intended context.

Re: For the Love of Pipes

#54

Post by quietbritishjim »

mothsonasloth wrote: post #51

[Quote] The Unix philosophy is documented by Doug McIlroy as: Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new “features”. Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don’t clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don’t insist on interactive input.…

Reformatted to be readable:

> Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new “features”.

> Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don’t clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don’t insist on interactive input.

> Design and build software, even operating systems, to be tried early, ideally within weeks. Don’t hesitate to throw away the clumsy parts and rebuild them.

> Use tools in preference to unskilled help to lighten a programming task, even if you have to detour to build the tools and expect to throw some of them out after you’ve finished using them.

Re: For the Love of Pipes

#57

Post by viraptor »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #22

I think the Unix pipeline works because this it has this moldable and expressive text substance that is exchanged. Gstreamer also has pipelines, but the result in my opinion is quite awkward because events of many types are exchanged. Windows Powershell also has a pipeline where objects are exchanged, but it also somehow failed to become a huge success. i think the unix pipeline concept doesn't quite scale to other d…

> Windows Powershell also has a pipeline where objects are exchanged, but it also somehow failed to become a huge success.

I believe it is a huge success in the crowd it was aimed for. (non-trivial size Windows admins)

Re: For the Love of Pipes

#58

Post by lincpa »

The Pure Function Pipeline Data Flow

https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow

Using the input and output characteristics of pure functions, pure functions are used as pipelines. Dataflow is formed by a series of pure functions in series. A dataflow code block as a function, equivalent to an integrated circuit element (or board)。 A complete integrated system is formed by serial or parallel dataflow.

data-flow is current-flow, function is chip, thread macro (->>, -> etc.) is a wire, and the entire system is an integrated circuit that is energized.

Re: For the Love of Pipes

#59

Post by alias_neo »

Insanity wrote: post #5
alias_neo wrote: post #2

Anyone else disappointed that this wasn't some in-depth, Docker related pipe usage post? For those of us that know who Jess is, the post is a little lacking. I went there to read about some cool things she's doing with pipe, but was disappointed at a post that contained nothing.

I disagree - the pipe command is trivial at least to us whom have used linux (or unix) based systems for a long time. But to people who follow her and are rather new to this way of doing things, this could be a good read. Either way, it is nice to be reminded of the unix philosophy about chaining tools together for junior and senior alike. Edit: typo fixes

Fair enough. I'm a little surprised at the response. I didn't expect many people here aren't already intimately familiar with pipes, and for those that aren't *nix users, I'm not sure the content is of interest.

I guess being honest around here is the wrong thing.

Re: For the Love of Pipes

#60

Post by tripa »

jgtrosh wrote: post #24
benj111 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chmod +x /dev/null (havent tried above, not sure I recommend that you do)

Well you can't read either from /dev/null, and I don't think that's just a question of permissions. I'm pretty sure it's impossible to get /dev/null to behave like an executable.

/dev/null behaves like an empty file, which is (or used to be?) a valid executable.

Cf http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/humor/ATT_Copyright_true.html or https://twitter.com/rob_pike/status/966896123548872705

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