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Sometimes, if the tools are designed really well, they do combine. Witness the success of Unix pipelines, or the nigh-magical ability of TCP to work over Ethern
by pjscott 16y ago
Sometimes, if the tools are designed really well, they do combine. Witness the success of Unix pipelines, or the nigh-magical ability of TCP to work over Ethernet, Wifi, a modem, or whatever other complex systems people dream up.
Being able to combine complex systems is a good thing, and it shouldn't be disparaged as unrealistic.
- forensic 16y agoWhenever I think about the magical abilities of TCP I experience great pleasure.
- klochner 16y agoNote example (1): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_abstraction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_abstraction
- xyzzyz 16y agoApplications communicating via Unix pipelines indeed do frequently combine, albeit rarely without great amounts of awk/grep/sed glue and reimplementation of parsing machinery in every link in a chain. I don't say that pipelines are bad, it's just sometimes we want more structured data format than flat text. Also, Unix pipelines are currently in decline, and Unix itself is less Unixy than it used to be.
- bingaman 16y agoUnix pipelines are currently in decline Citation needed
- aaronblohowiak 16y agoNeither unix pipes nor TCP are particularly complex, and it is their simplicity that lets them be combined -- easier to combine a hammer and an axe than a nail-gun and a rotary saw.