Learn a Programming Language Faster by Copying Unix
rodrigoalvesvieira.com
Learn a Programming Language Faster by Copying Unix
1–10 of 110 posts
Re: Learn a Programming Language Faster by Copying Unix
#2He's right. I have versions of "cat" in Java, Perl, Python, and C, all source. Reading from stdin and writing to stdout is the skeleton of a lot of tools, so starting from "cat" source is often the best way to get going on a new tool.
Re: Learn a Programming Language Faster by Copying Unix
#3This is kind of funny since I taught myself a lot of go by porting a bunch of the coreutils. It still amazes me how much there is to learn from unix. Many many times I find myself going back to some programs src (cron, find, etc.) when I need the design/algorithm/feature in my own programs.
Re: Learn a Programming Language Faster by Copying Unix
#4Rodrigo, I thought you should know that when browsing your site on an iPhone 4, the header overlapped the index. That wasn't a great description, so here is a screenshot: http://db.tt/7grTPHsL
You also cannot zoom in, which made it very hard to read.
Re: Learn a Programming Language Faster by Copying Unix
#5I always implement "cat" as a first toy application when learning a new langauge - it's a great introduction tool as it deals with dealing with files, dealing with streams (stdin) and so on.
Re: Learn a Programming Language Faster by Copying Unix
#6I agree with this and have done it in the past myself. Its a great learning exercise for new languages. The problems are easily defined and its apparent when you've successfully completed. Once you've done with the easier ones try implementing grep and then diff.
Re: Learn a Programming Language Faster by Copying Unix
#7This is a brilliant idea, and may I suggest that one takes it slightly further than just implementing the core functionality, and aiming for a complete clone (optional parameters and all) with a few enhancements.
Indeed, for a further ego boost, why not also benchmark the performance of your versions against the performance of the native utilities? You never know, your new clone might end up being the new 'less' to the old 'more'!
Re: Learn a Programming Language Faster by Copying Unix
#8My favourite way to learn new languages & platforms was implementing a du-like ('disk usage') tool. It was also the exercise I proposed to my students. It doesn't require complex algorithms but touches a lot of the basics: recursion, filesystems, command line parsing, output formatting, etc.
Re: Learn a Programming Language Faster by Copying Unix
#9The example code for cat is only half of cat, which reminds me of Rob Pike's criticism of "cat -v"---Unix programs are often more complicated than they arguably should be, are "reimplementing" Unix programs often means implementing a small subset of the features.
Or, look up the manpage for your locally installed "tree" and see how many non-standard options and features have been bolted on.
I think it would be helpful when reimplementing Unix to try to work in more core features of the language, like its object or module system, which are more important than parsing argv or touching the filesystem.
Re: Learn a Programming Language Faster by Copying Unix
#10For those who want a very clear, concise set of userland code to try translating for practice, consider using 9base: http://tools.suckless.org/9base
It's not quite Unix, but it's still quite lovely and it's rather succinct:
"It also contains the Plan 9 libc, libbio, libregexp, libfmt and libutf. The overall SLOC is about 66kSLOC, so this userland + all libs is much smaller than, e.g. bash (duh!)."