For the Love of Pipes • Hacker News Board

Re: For the Love of Pipes

#321

Post by dan-robertson » Sat, Jan 26, 2019, 3:59 PM UTC

Pawamoy wrote: post #278

dan-robertson wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens when you rely on non standard behaviour of unix tools, or just non-posix tools that change from beneath you? I’m not saying that this makes powershell pipes better/worse, just that this problem isn’t unique. Microsoft tends to be reasonably committed to backwards compatibility but I don’t know the answer to the question

I think they were talking about objects at execution time, not version compatibility.

I don’t really understand what this means. The parent specifically writes “backwards compatibility.” The only other thing I think you might be referring to is if the reading process mutates the objects does that somehow affect the writing end of the pipe but I think that doesn’t make sense from a “sane way of doing inter-process communication” standpoint. Is there something else you are referring to? Could you elaborate please?

Re: For the Love of Pipes

#322

Post by cben » Sun, Jan 27, 2019, 11:08 AM UTC

anthk wrote: post #316

leethargo wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I enjoyed it when I read it many years ago, but maybe that was because I was inexperienced and naive. Could you recommend some "original sources" to learn from, instead? Ideally in book form?

Not TAOUP specially, but the Jargon file is what ESR took loads of things as wrong or Unix related. Also, at TAOUP you have Emacs, which is the Anti-UNIX by definition. https://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html

TAOUP had a chapter "a tale of 5 editors" discussing emacs, vi, and more, and does point out emacs is an outlier (and outsider) to many unix principles. It does quote Doug McIlroy speaking against it (but also against vi?). It attempts to generalize from discussing "The Right Size for an Editor" question to discussing how to think about "The Right Size of Software".

I don't know if it's possible to have impartially "fair" discussion of editors. Skimming now, I can see how vi lovers would hate some characterizations there. But it does try to learn interesting lessons from them.

It does NOT simply equate "Emacs has UNIX nature" so you can't just prove something like "TAOUP mentions Emacs, Emacs is GNU, Gnu is Not Unix => TAOUP is not UNIX, QED" ;-)

http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch13s02.html

bias disclaimers: I learnt most of what I know of unix from within Emacs, which I still use ~20 years later. I learnt more from Info pages than man pages (AIX had pretty bad man pages). I suspect you have a different picture of unix than I. And I now know better than arguing which editor is better ;)

But I found TAOUP articulated ideas I only learnt through osmosis. I'm looking forward to reading a better articulation if you know one.

Re: For the Love of Pipes

#323

Post by Breza » Tue, Jan 29, 2019, 6:33 PM UTC

matchagaucho wrote: post #170

mothsonasloth wrote: post #51

[Quote] The Unix philosophy is documented by Doug McIlroy as: Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new “features”. Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don’t clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don’t insist on interactive input.…

From 1978, and still applicable to microservices today.

That's my reaction too! Microservices with a dash of agile.