Thanks for the link! I didn't know that was the context for that famous quote, and it was a nice read. It seems that we so seldom get to experience that kind of

Thanks for the link! I didn't know that was the context for that famous quote, and it was a nice read. It seems that we so seldom get to experience that kind of perfection in software, which is always tangled up and half nonsense. It really is a wonder that anything works. To me, the ideal of "abstraction" in software has to do with this search for unity, on a conceptual level. Unix with its files and processes seems to come pretty close to being this kind of dependable, understandable, cohesive abstraction... which is why I love shell scripting so much. Sure, it's not the most beautiful language, but the basic building blocks make sense in some almost timeless way. Digressing further, I'd really love to work on a cleaner shell language. Like, Perl is an exploration of what happens if you write your scripts in a souped-up awk, but what I really want is a bash for us new kids, with good support for nested data structures, functional patterns, some more clever ways of representing background processes and FIFOs, modules and packages, etc etc. I forget how I got from Heidegger to FIFOs, but yeah, a ready-to-hand shell that works well with common tasks like serving HTTP and building JSON and stuff. I love the Unix philosophy but people aren't really learning shell these days... something like it seems like a way forward... composing simple programs... ah!