5 ms·

The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature

36 points by saurabh 16y ago

mmc 16y ago
What a great essay, if out of date - I suppose maybe Windows' PowerShell might have changed his opinion of NT? I wonder if the whiff of elitism he mentions is still a reason for people to avoid UNIX, or if the availability of Linux has changed that.
- cparedes 16y ago
  I would wager that he might grant some charity to PowerShell, but still hold onto his thesis. AFAIK, you operate on objects in PS, rather than parsing clear text in UNIX. PS is a much more powerful way to do things, but it seems that the UNIX way is much more grounded in human language than the Windows way, whether it be through a GUI or through PS.
knowledgesale 16y ago
I sense parody but can't retrieve the source.
donaq 16y ago
Did the fact that I enjoyed the essay mean that I read the essay right or that the author read me right?
10ren 16y ago
After coding parsers, my English became a little more refined (or possibly, just my interpretation of my grammatical decisions become a little more refined): I had said "one can reuse code as a platform or library", but realized that that could imply that I thought those two were different names for the same thing, and this ambiguity could be avoided by "one can reuse code as a platform or a library". This was precisely the grammatical issue that came up in my parsing code (actually for fields that can hold a choice of types). Of course it's no surprise - Chomsky is a linguist - but such an absolutely direct connection between programming and speaking was striking to me. An interesting point in the article is that GUI's have become synonymous with constrained choice. Constrained choice can be a good and useful thing, but a graphical representation is potentially much freer than text (consider an image of text in photoshop). I think the closest we have to this in common use is hierarchical tree views (as in vim's NERDTree, or java's JTree, or in windows directories), but they are still very constrained. We could have free-floating graphs with arcs and nodes everywhere; or handwritten algebra; or even active diagrams! (not sure what that would be!). But we don't. I think it's partly because the mouse is great for pointing; not so great for drawing. You really need a pen tablet (which many artists use), or.... a multi-touch screen. People, I think there's a deep opportunity here to change everything. I've long been curious about Perl's growth... did it in fact grow more strongly in NT than unix? It was the best linguistic tool around with no real competition at all, unlike in unix (BTW Wall: also a linguist). Did this then form a stronghold, from which to launch back into Unix? It's an appealingly logical adoption path.
balding_n_tired 16y ago
Years ago I worked with a government techie, a fellow who had written a masters thesis on W.B. Yeats. One day, as we were discussing the dim prospects for the line of proprietary minicomputers we worked with, he said, "Jim, I think we're fastened to a dying animal." (http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/3847.html http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/3847.html)
onan_barbarian 16y ago
You are not expected to understand this.

36 points by saurabh 16y ago

mmc 16y ago

What a great essay, if out of date - I suppose maybe Windows' PowerShell might have changed his opinion of NT? I wonder if the whiff of elitism he mentions is still a reason for people to avoid UNIX, or if the availability of Linux has changed that.

cparedes 16y ago
I would wager that he might grant some charity to PowerShell, but still hold onto his thesis. AFAIK, you operate on objects in PS, rather than parsing clear text in UNIX. PS is a much more powerful way to do things, but it seems that the UNIX way is much more grounded in human language than the Windows way, whether it be through a GUI or through PS.

knowledgesale 16y ago

I sense parody but can't retrieve the source.

donaq 16y ago

Did the fact that I enjoyed the essay mean that I read the essay right or that the author read me right?

10ren 16y ago

After coding parsers, my English became a little more refined (or possibly, just my interpretation of my grammatical decisions become a little more refined): I had said "one can reuse code as a platform or library", but realized that that could imply that I thought those two were different names for the same thing, and this ambiguity could be avoided by "one can reuse code as a platform or a library". This was precisely the grammatical issue that came up in my parsing code (actually for fields that can hold a choice of types). Of course it's no surprise - Chomsky is a linguist - but such an absolutely direct connection between programming and speaking was striking to me. An interesting point in the article is that GUI's have become synonymous with constrained choice. Constrained choice can be a good and useful thing, but a graphical representation is potentially much freer than text (consider an image of text in photoshop). I think the closest we have to this in common use is hierarchical tree views (as in vim's NERDTree, or java's JTree, or in windows directories), but they are still very constrained. We could have free-floating graphs with arcs and nodes everywhere; or handwritten algebra; or even active diagrams! (not sure what that would be!). But we don't. I think it's partly because the mouse is great for pointing; not so great for drawing. You really need a pen tablet (which many artists use), or.... a multi-touch screen. People, I think there's a deep opportunity here to change everything. I've long been curious about Perl's growth... did it in fact grow more strongly in NT than unix? It was the best linguistic tool around with no real competition at all, unlike in unix (BTW Wall: also a linguist). Did this then form a stronghold, from which to launch back into Unix? It's an appealingly logical adoption path.

balding_n_tired 16y ago

Years ago I worked with a government techie, a fellow who had written a masters thesis on W.B. Yeats. One day, as we were discussing the dim prospects for the line of proprietary minicomputers we worked with, he said, "Jim, I think we're fastened to a dying animal." (http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/3847.html http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/3847.html)

onan_barbarian 16y ago

You are not expected to understand this.