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It’s because fundamentally, when you get right down to it, we’re manipulating text files. Text is a very dense way to represent logic and ideas. This is not l
by Lio 7y ago
It’s because fundamentally, when you get right down to it, we’re manipulating text files.
Text is a very dense way to represent logic and ideas.
This is not like legacy software that you can rewrite.
You can add a GUI based on ideas from the late 70s/80s if you like but you’re still unlikely to come up with a more succinct way to represent logic than can be held in a text file.
So it follows that small tools that deal directly with manipulating text will be useful as long as text is useful.
- zokier 7y agoI'd say that fundamentally we are manipulating streams or arrays of numbers. Everything is built on top of that. Each character in a tex is a number. Each pixel is a number. Each sample of sound is a number. For computers how the number ends up being transferred to the puny meatbag is completely incidental. In more practical terms at least for me, vast majority of stuff I mangle through shell is not really text but structured data, typically either some sort of tree or a table, or something in-between. Sometimes the structure is more ad-hoc, sometimes it is very rigidly defined, but it's still there