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As someone who learned about regular expressions before extensively using grep, I found grep to be quite unintuitive, since extended grep is what I am conceptua
by mirker 4y ago
As someone who learned about regular expressions before extensively using grep, I found grep to be quite unintuitive, since extended grep is what I am conceptually thinking about from a “theory” point if view. One difference between grep and compression is that grep is bounded by regular languages, but compression is more free form. It’s conceivable to therefore view grep as mature enough of a technology to be finished once and for all, but compression will continue branching into many disparate algorithms.
- richard_todd 4y agoConsider the popularity of ffmpeg and imagemagick. Putting the mainstream algorithms together under one interface seems to be an appealing model to a lot of people, even though new algorithms are constantly being developed in those areas. Personally, for audio encoding, I'm much happier just installing ffmpeg than I would be gathering and learning a bunch of flac/ogg/opus/mp3/etc encoders.
- mirker 4y agoYes, those are quite different. But you also can’t pipe lossy compression data willy-nilly without compounding data loss, so it’s hard to imagine an alternative with unix-style tools. The difference may also stem from those being application-focused rather than command line, so they don’t have a burden of maintaining legacy applications forever.