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The Unix Philosophy

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Re: The Unix Philosophy

#171

Post by blakeyrat »

jalfresi wrote: post #92
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #32

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…

Recently I've been exploring the idea that small programs should consist of two parts; a "backend" that you can communicate with via a strict message protocol like protobuf. It can handle multiple requests because it is a mini server, the message format is locked to a "type" and you communicate with it via RPC. The second part is a "frontend", a command-line client that does all the unixy stuff with text streams etc;…

That's how a lot of well-designed software works, including Windows (in general) and old-school Mac Classic with AppleEvents (not sure if OS X still does that.)

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#172

Post by jalfresi »

forgottenpass wrote: post #142
jalfresi wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently I've been exploring the idea that small programs should consist of two parts; a "backend" that you can communicate with via a strict message protocol like protobuf. It can handle multiple requests because it is a mini server, the message format is locked to a "type" and you communicate with it via RPC. The second part is a "frontend", a command-line client that does all the unixy stuff with text streams etc;…

You're sort of describing the design idea common in unix-y areas to build libfoo that does all the work, then a foo frontend that makes tasks useable from the command line. I don't know how widely used this model is, but it's certainly out there. The difference is that in what I've described, the ABI is the common interface and an RPC server would be just another consumer of the library.

Yup, even better!

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#173

Post by [deleted] »

coldtea wrote: post #154
yummyfajitas wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't you evaluate his claims on their own merits? Unless he's saying "trust me, I won't expose my reasoning but it's solid", or unless you are outsourcing your thinking, such things would seem to be irrelevant.

> Can't you evaluate his claims on their own merits? As with most things, it takes too much time to do that in detail for every argument one hears. Thankfully with the magic of brain's pattern matching and previous experience to BS arguments we don't have to. We can eliminate tons of opinions from the list of "potentially interesting to investigate" by their mere showing of certain characteristics we already know lea…

[deleted]

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#174

Post by [deleted] »

coldtea wrote: post #154
yummyfajitas wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't you evaluate his claims on their own merits? Unless he's saying "trust me, I won't expose my reasoning but it's solid", or unless you are outsourcing your thinking, such things would seem to be irrelevant.

> Can't you evaluate his claims on their own merits? As with most things, it takes too much time to do that in detail for every argument one hears. Thankfully with the magic of brain's pattern matching and previous experience to BS arguments we don't have to. We can eliminate tons of opinions from the list of "potentially interesting to investigate" by their mere showing of certain characteristics we already know lea…

[deleted]

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#176

Post by jalfresi »

blakeyrat wrote: post #171
jalfresi wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently I've been exploring the idea that small programs should consist of two parts; a "backend" that you can communicate with via a strict message protocol like protobuf. It can handle multiple requests because it is a mini server, the message format is locked to a "type" and you communicate with it via RPC. The second part is a "frontend", a command-line client that does all the unixy stuff with text streams etc;…

That's how a lot of well-designed software works, including Windows (in general) and old-school Mac Classic with AppleEvents (not sure if OS X still does that.)

Yeah it kinda reminds me of the "plumbing and porcelain" approach of some programs like git. It also is nice that a lot of modern init process can fire up the back ends on demand and kill them after a while.

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#177

Post by yummyfajitas »

coldtea wrote: post #154
yummyfajitas wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't you evaluate his claims on their own merits? Unless he's saying "trust me, I won't expose my reasoning but it's solid", or unless you are outsourcing your thinking, such things would seem to be irrelevant.

> Can't you evaluate his claims on their own merits? As with most things, it takes too much time to do that in detail for every argument one hears. Thankfully with the magic of brain's pattern matching and previous experience to BS arguments we don't have to. We can eliminate tons of opinions from the list of "potentially interesting to investigate" by their mere showing of certain characteristics we already know lea…

You are conflating a property of the claim itself (violating the laws of physics) with a straw-man property of the person making the claim. They aren't the same thing - one enables a simple proof by contradiction, the other is ad-hominem.

Further, your "climate change, it's all bogus" ad hominem isn't even a real claim that skeptics make, and is more more indicative of your thinking than of reality.

I get the impression you are just looking for ways to dismiss arguments which make you emotionally uncomfortable. Consider religion instead, it's a lot more unapologetic about simply declaring who the heretics are.

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#178

Post by kanzure »

jalfresi wrote: post #92
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #32

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…

Recently I've been exploring the idea that small programs should consist of two parts; a "backend" that you can communicate with via a strict message protocol like protobuf. It can handle multiple requests because it is a mini server, the message format is locked to a "type" and you communicate with it via RPC. The second part is a "frontend", a command-line client that does all the unixy stuff with text streams etc;…

> Recently I've been exploring the idea that small programs should consist of two parts; a "backend" that you can communicate with via a strict message protocol like protobuf. It can handle multiple requests because it is a mini server, the message format is locked to a "type" and you communicate with it via RPC.

Well there was an implementation of something like that, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCE/RPC

or DCOM, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Component_Object_M...

then there was dcop, dbus, and a bunch of others and now nobody remembers what the goal was

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#179

Post by jalfresi »

fmoralesc wrote: post #104
jalfresi wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently I've been exploring the idea that small programs should consist of two parts; a "backend" that you can communicate with via a strict message protocol like protobuf. It can handle multiple requests because it is a mini server, the message format is locked to a "type" and you communicate with it via RPC. The second part is a "frontend", a command-line client that does all the unixy stuff with text streams etc;…

Incidentally, this is what neovim does.[1] [1]: http://neovim.io/doc/user/msgpack_rpc.html#msgpack-rpc

Thanks for the solid example. I especially like the use of the NVIM_LISTEN_ADDRESS environment variable for service discovery of the backend!

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#180

Post by coldtea »

coldtea wrote: post #154
yummyfajitas wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't you evaluate his claims on their own merits? Unless he's saying "trust me, I won't expose my reasoning but it's solid", or unless you are outsourcing your thinking, such things would seem to be irrelevant.

> Can't you evaluate his claims on their own merits? As with most things, it takes too much time to do that in detail for every argument one hears. Thankfully with the magic of brain's pattern matching and previous experience to BS arguments we don't have to. We can eliminate tons of opinions from the list of "potentially interesting to investigate" by their mere showing of certain characteristics we already know lea…

>You are conflating a property of the claim itself (violating the laws of physics) with a straw-man property of the person making the claim. They aren't the same thing - one enables a simple proof by contradiction, the other is ad-hominem.

I don't see why you think I haven't considered that.

My whole argument is based on the idea that ad-hominens are pefectly fine in some cases.

When? For people with a bogus claims record.

How? Under the observation that a person making some bogus claims is also likely to make more bogus claims -- and thus the person can be dismissed as a general bogus-claims-maker.

Why might lose some good arguments he might make here and there, but life's too short, and dismissing the person completely gives us time to listen to people with a better "claims" track record.

In essense, the very basic of filtering, that everybody does (more or less well), and you undoubtly do as well.

>I call your "climate change, it's all bogus" claim a straw man, and indicative more of your thinking than of reality, because that's not even a claim that skeptics make.

Actually lots of "spectics" make it. Some make a lesser claim, that's its not human-caused, but others also claim it's not happening altogether. There's even a term for that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial

>I get the impression you are just looking for ways to dismiss arguments which make you emotionally uncomfortable.

Nope, I'm looking for ways to dismiss arguments which waste my time.

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