Bringing the Unix philosophy to the 21st century (2019)

#1

Post by todsacerdoti » Sun, Aug 22, 2021, 3:22 PM UTC

Bringing the Unix philosophy to the 21st century (2019)
blog.kellybrazil.com

Re: Bringing the Unix philosophy to the 21st century (2019)

#2

Post by richardanaya » Sun, Aug 22, 2021, 4:08 PM UTC

I was literally just thinking about this a few days ago. I'm super excited by https://www.nushell.sh/ . I think they are hitting on an order of magnitude improvement paradigm of shells that fit very nicely with the theme of this article.

Re: Bringing the Unix philosophy to the 21st century (2019)

#3

Post by zokier » Sun, Aug 22, 2021, 4:13 PM UTC

> (iii) [...] Don't hesitate to throw away clumsy parts and rebuild them.

Some forgotten wisdom right there.

Re: Bringing the Unix philosophy to the 21st century (2019)

#4

Post by sonofajojo » Sun, Aug 22, 2021, 4:15 PM UTC

richardanaya wrote: post #2

I was literally just thinking about this a few days ago. I'm super excited by https://www.nushell.sh/ . I think they are hitting on an order of magnitude improvement paradigm of shells that fit very nicely with the theme of this article.

This reminds me of powershell

Re: Bringing the Unix philosophy to the 21st century (2019)

#5

Post by natt941 » Sun, Aug 22, 2021, 4:20 PM UTC

I can understand why the idea of more structured, object-like input and output is appealing, but after using PowerShell for a while, my take is that it's much harder to manipulate objects into a consistent format than it is to manipulate text. For instance, if you want to compare Azure DNS records with DNS records from a Windows server, it's a huge pain because Get-AzDnsRecordSet and Get-DnsServerResourceRecord return objects with different structures. Same problem if you want to pipe output of one util to another which expects slightly different format of input. More generally, text is great for loose coupling; structured objects, less so.

Re: Bringing the Unix philosophy to the 21st century (2019)

#6

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Aug 22, 2021, 4:27 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Bringing the Unix philosophy to the 21st century (2019)

#7

Post by seppoonbi3 » Sun, Aug 22, 2021, 4:30 PM UTC

I have noticed that people intuitively use unix philosophy _inside_ their programs. Not often you see well written software with functions that do not respect the unix philosophy (if only they would be programs and not functions).

Re: Bringing the Unix philosophy to the 21st century (2019)

#8

Post by dan-robertson » Sun, Aug 22, 2021, 4:37 PM UTC

seppoonbi3 wrote: post #7

I have noticed that people intuitively use unix philosophy _inside_ their programs. Not often you see well written software with functions that do not respect the unix philosophy (if only they would be programs and not functions).

Emacs is in many ways anti-Unix-philosophy and I think the way it’s software tends to be structured is no exception. Functions can get ad-hoc extensions or modifications all over the place with advice and hooks and dynamic scoping[1]. The only similarity is that in Unix most things are files and in Emacs most things are buffers.

[1] Unix has weird ad-hoc mechanisms too like environment variables or your PATH containing modified versions of programs, and it has programs that do a thousand and one things, but I claim those are mostly violations of the Unix philosophy.