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The Rule of Silence (2006)

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Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#111

Post by swiley »

vog wrote: post #17
dom0 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Note that the "rule of silence" (combined with the habit of writing documentation like longform essays) is also one factor that makes unix-like systems newbie-unfriendly. (Famous example: trying to exit vi) $ man foo *scroll to the end with the EXAMPLES section* There should be an option for that. man --take-me-to-the-examples foo

(NOTE: The parent comment was edited. This response applies to the original parent comment that contained just the command line ("man foo" + EXAMPLE section) and nothing else.) Wow, I haven't seen such a blunt and unhelpful RFTM comment for a while. This comment is inappropriate in so many ways: 1) The unix systems have an inconsistent documentation mix of man pages, info pages, "-h", "-help", "--help", HTML docs, se…

You don't really need an "examples" section for vim, 90% of the time you just type "vim file" which the usage info probably covers well enough. You only need an "examples" section for something like zip.

Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#112

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #101
borplk wrote: post #74

To play devil's advocate, part of the reason things like The Rule of Silence are talked about is because of the messy unix philosophy of treating everything like plain text. If structured data was embraced we would have developed appropriate tooling to interact with it in the way that we prefer. This runs very deep in unix and a lot of people are too "brainwashed" to think of other ways. Instead they develop other ex…

That's my primary issue with UNIX culture. It took a huge step backwards by deciding to work with unstructured text. It wasn't a wrong turn , mind you. It was backtracking on known and understood best practices all the way and then picking a wrong turn. And only now people seem to rediscover what was in common use in the era before UNIX - the virtues of structured text. I guess our industry is meant to run in circles…

Structured text is good. Very good, in fact. It might even be idea. structured binary data, less so, at least as a storage format.

I want to be able to look at your file format using tools that haven't been specialized to the task. Is that so wrong?

Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#113

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #107
Vogtinator wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can just develop alternative tools and pipe JSON. Text and data in one. Pipes can transfer arbitrary data, so it's just the tools that you don't like, not the underlying mechanism.

Yeah, but that's the point. Pipes are fine. The tools suck, though. UNIX would be infinitely better if it defaulted to piping structured text instead of making each tool have to implement its own shotgun parser.

...So you're talking about having text-serialized key-value objects (or any other kind of object), with standard deserializers and tools for manipulation?

That's actually a great idea. Better yet, it's actually viable now, unlike many proposals for "fixing" unix.

Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#114

Post by pwdisswordfish »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #107
Vogtinator wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can just develop alternative tools and pipe JSON. Text and data in one. Pipes can transfer arbitrary data, so it's just the tools that you don't like, not the underlying mechanism.

Yeah, but that's the point. Pipes are fine. The tools suck, though. UNIX would be infinitely better if it defaulted to piping structured text instead of making each tool have to implement its own shotgun parser.

But then when you put structured data through pipes, why bother with making it text at all (over the wire, at least)?

Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#115

Post by SixSigma »

pwdisswordfish wrote: post #77
borplk wrote: post #74

To play devil's advocate, part of the reason things like The Rule of Silence are talked about is because of the messy unix philosophy of treating everything like plain text. If structured data was embraced we would have developed appropriate tooling to interact with it in the way that we prefer. This runs very deep in unix and a lot of people are too "brainwashed" to think of other ways. Instead they develop other ex…

The text-oriented nature of Unix may be a mistake, but the Rule of Silence is not concerned with it. It is about not overwhelming the user with information they are not interested in. GUIs can follow or violate the Rule of Silence just as well.

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Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#117

Post by pgt »

Spolsky addressed this cultural difference between the Windows and Unix world in 2003: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/12/14/biculturalism/

At its core, it is about putting humans before computers. Engelbart coined HCI as Human Computer Interface, not CHI. This philosophy steered my product designs ever since I read that as a teenager.

Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#118

Post by dagw »

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #112
TeMPOraL wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's my primary issue with UNIX culture. It took a huge step backwards by deciding to work with unstructured text. It wasn't a wrong turn , mind you. It was backtracking on known and understood best practices all the way and then picking a wrong turn. And only now people seem to rediscover what was in common use in the era before UNIX - the virtues of structured text. I guess our industry is meant to run in circles…

Structured text is good. Very good, in fact. It might even be idea. structured binary data , less so, at least as a storage format. I want to be able to look at your file format using tools that haven't been specialized to the task. Is that so wrong?

Parsing structured text is slow and inefficient. Also reading out just one part of a data structure stored as text often requires either walking through the file character by character or first slurping the whole thing into memory.

Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#119

Post by laumars »

augustk wrote: post #66

One consequence of "the rule of silence" is that sometimes it is not obvious if a command is processing data or waiting for input, there is no visual difference.

That's more an occasional annoyance than a real problem though. The only commands that don't prompt when waiting for input are commands that are written specifically for stream processing from stdin. In which case the user should already be aware of it's behaviour because they're either already familiar with the command or have have consulted it's man page (or similar reference) before executing it. So the unprompted waiting for using input is a bug in a shell script / command line pipe and thus usually pretty quick to debug.

Going back to the man page point: I will granted you that not everyone does check what a program does before running it. Sadly in those instances there's little you can do to protect them from themselves. It's similar to how you cannot protect people from blindly copying and pasting code from the internet. If someone is willing to run a command "blind" then the usefulness of the output is the least of their worries.

Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#120

Post by Pxtl »

skrebbel wrote: post #80
borplk wrote: post #74

To play devil's advocate, part of the reason things like The Rule of Silence are talked about is because of the messy unix philosophy of treating everything like plain text. If structured data was embraced we would have developed appropriate tooling to interact with it in the way that we prefer. This runs very deep in unix and a lot of people are too "brainwashed" to think of other ways. Instead they develop other ex…

In 1993, someone made exactly your argument a in Redmond board room, and so many people agreed that what you describe could be adequately called "The Windows Philosophy". All settings in a database and not text files (the registry); a command-line that pipes data, not text (PowerShell). Tailored UIs to change settings, not magic invocations and obsure text file syntaxes. I guess most developers on HN are also aware o…

The simple fact that the Registry doesn't have comments is ludicrous.
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