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I really agree with aspects of this, and I think CLIs and Unix pipes are way more powerful than we treat them, but be forewarned that there are problems with do

I really agree with aspects of this, and I think CLIs and Unix pipes are way more powerful than we treat them, but be forewarned that there are problems with doing everything with pipes. You need to code more defensively with them. For example, it is rare, but every so often a newline will be fail to be emitted. kinda\n likethis\n \n example\n There are many other gotchas, but that one is a doozy because if you're using, say, tab delimited data and cut you'll miss a line. It's one of the reasons I use line delimited JSON if at all possible. Also, this constant re-parsing of text does mean your string validation needs to be more paranoid. For example, some JSON parsers parse curly quotes as normal programming quotes. Horrible practice, I know, but it could have been avoided. Also, it's easy to accidentally do shit like this when you're in a rush. Some string matching tools handle the character matching of the different ways of creating, say, "ë" will also make matching quotes more relaxed. Anyway, all of this to say that I 100% agree with the posted and linked articles, but each method has its own security considerations and software folk should be aware of them before starting.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
This is one of the reasons I prefer PowerShell, it requires a lot fewer text parsing shenanigans. UNIX tools simply failed to evolve. Single io stream pipelining on raw ASCII was perfectly reasonable in the 1970s but it isn't the 1970s anymore. We should be composing tools with multiple typed io stream paths in GUIs (or TUIs I suppose), leveraging two or even three dimensional layouts. All our interfaces should be composed this way, allowing us to take them apart and modify them at will to fit our workflow. But that never happened. We never made a better hammer, we just try to squeeze all our problems into ASCII-processing nails instead.
- marmaduke 8y ago
  But do you have similar tools as te core CLI tools on Linux like grep and sed? How do you discover functionality without man?
- 3pt14159 8y ago
  You know it is so funny that you're mentioning this. I completely agree. It's to the point where I've been toying around with creating my own shell and faking typed IO streams via Postgres+DSL. It's tricky though. Sometimes I want pub-sub, other times I want event stream. Sometimes I want crash-on-failure, other times I don't. There is this problem in software that I can't really word precisely, but the closest I can come is "do it like this, except these cases here, except-except those cases there" and these things kinda keep stacking up until you have a program that has too much knowledge baked into it. Take, for example, emoji TLDs. Because emojis aren't consistent across platforms they can get coerced into different types. I didn't know that when I bought and used a couple emoji domains. When someone tried to click on a link in Android and was met with a 404, I was so confused. I wasn't even seeing the request come into nginx! After I figured it out, I realized that emoji domains won't work. The underlying assumption of TLDs is that there is one, and only one, way of encoding something and that these things aren't coerced. That assumption is wrong.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago

This is one of the reasons I prefer PowerShell, it requires a lot fewer text parsing shenanigans. UNIX tools simply failed to evolve. Single io stream pipelining on raw ASCII was perfectly reasonable in the 1970s but it isn't the 1970s anymore. We should be composing tools with multiple typed io stream paths in GUIs (or TUIs I suppose), leveraging two or even three dimensional layouts. All our interfaces should be composed this way, allowing us to take them apart and modify them at will to fit our workflow. But that never happened. We never made a better hammer, we just try to squeeze all our problems into ASCII-processing nails instead.

marmaduke 8y ago
But do you have similar tools as te core CLI tools on Linux like grep and sed? How do you discover functionality without man?
3pt14159 8y ago
You know it is so funny that you're mentioning this. I completely agree. It's to the point where I've been toying around with creating my own shell and faking typed IO streams via Postgres+DSL. It's tricky though. Sometimes I want pub-sub, other times I want event stream. Sometimes I want crash-on-failure, other times I don't. There is this problem in software that I can't really word precisely, but the closest I can come is "do it like this, except these cases here, except-except those cases there" and these things kinda keep stacking up until you have a program that has too much knowledge baked into it. Take, for example, emoji TLDs. Because emojis aren't consistent across platforms they can get coerced into different types. I didn't know that when I bought and used a couple emoji domains. When someone tried to click on a link in Android and was met with a 404, I was so confused. I wasn't even seeing the request come into nginx! After I figured it out, I realized that emoji domains won't work. The underlying assumption of TLDs is that there is one, and only one, way of encoding something and that these things aren't coerced. That assumption is wrong.