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Except that a program-to-program interface based on formatting and parsing text is anything but clean.
Yes, modularity is important. However, in some cases, this philosophy has resulted in the "tangled mess held together by duct tape" kind of systems architecture that no one dares to touch for fear of breaking things.
I think Unix philosophy is struggling with a fundamental dilemma:
On one hand, creating systems from programs written by different people requires stronger formal guarantees in order to make interfaces more reliable, stronger guarantees than interfaces within one large program written by one person or a small team would require.
On the other hand, creating systems from programms written by different people requires more flexibile interfaces that can deal with versioning, backward and forward compatibility, etc, something that is extremely difficult to do across programming languages without heaping on massive complexity (CORBA, WS-deathstar, ...)
I think HTTP has shown that it can be done. But HTTP is also quite heavy weight. It doesn't exactly favor very small programs. Handling HTTP error codes is not something you'd want to do on every other function call.
In any event, I think Unix philosophy is a good place to start but needs a refresh in light of a couple of decades worth of experience.
This should be taught in any programming class. > Rule of Diversity: Distrust all claims for “one true way”. Although, does the python rule "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." contradict this one ? > Rule 5. Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are ce…
> does the python rule "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." contradict this one ? The irony is that Python has more ways of doing things in general and often the choice is very much non-obvious, compared to a language like Ruby which is supposedly embracing TIMTOWTDI. In other words, that Python rule doesn't match reality and I've always found it funny.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of interest, what are these political views that are so terrible that they should influence our views of his thoughts on operating system design? Edit: I really don't have any idea what they are...
Among other unpopular opinions, ESR denies AGW, believes that race and IQ are correlated, and was strongly in favor of the Iraq war.
the rule of separation makes me wonder if the long term legacy of Wayland will be as a hardware accelerated backend for X.
I wonder how relevant is it nowadays. Many good things we can't have, like systemd, if we have to follow strictly to the unix philosophy.
> The ‘Unix philosophy’ originated with Ken Thompson's early meditations on how to design a small but capable operating system with a clean service interface. Except that a program-to-program interface based on formatting and parsing text is anything but clean.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Among other unpopular opinions, ESR denies AGW, believes that race and IQ are correlated, and was strongly in favor of the Iraq war.
The first two are scientific, rather than political questions, aren't they?
I wonder how relevant is it nowadays. Many good things we can't have, like systemd, if we have to follow strictly to the unix philosophy.
The Single responsibility Principle (SRP), interfaces, cohesion and coupling are all relevant patterns and techniques that also describe the same design ideas.
The UNIX philosophy is simply one example of the above principles implemented at a user interface level, but they apply equally well in low-level embedded code, and device drivers just as well as in desktop and server land.
Software complexity grows exponentially with the number of internal interactions. by reducing the scope of any given module, you greatly simplify it. Thinking about, designing and implementing fixed interfaces between small cohesive modules helps this process and you get much more simple (as in the Rich Hickey sense) software as a result.
These same principles pop up all over the place in software, the Unix Philosophy, SRP, Microservices... they're all manifestations of the same thing.
I keep wondering about what seems to be the most important component of Unix philosophy: write many small programs that do one thing well and interface using text streams! Yes, modularity is important. However, in some cases, this philosophy has resulted in the "tangled mess held together by duct tape" kind of systems architecture that no one dares to touch for fear of breaking things. I think Unix philosophy is stru…