4 ms·
As sedq, who is dead for some reason, said: > When I read comments like this I'm left with two questions: 1. What are "serious applications"? 2. How does this
by derleth 15y ago
As sedq, who is dead for some reason, said:
> When I read comments like this I'm left with two questions: 1. What are "serious applications"? 2. How does this person define "failed"?
> This task of counting word frequencies looks like an ideal job for awk. But there are many ways to do it, and with different UNIX's utilities. UNIX is remarkably flexible.
> When awk was introduced it was not imagined that people would try to write 10 page programs with it. But of course, they did. Are these the so-called "serious applications" that some people want to write?
> If UNIX utilities and pipes (including the pipe function in C) are a "failure", why are they still with us after so many years? If that's failure, then what is "success"?
> I think it comes down to what you're trying to do. For processing text, such as the task discussed in the article, I find UNIX utilities to be enough.
> I still have no idea what "serious applications" are. Is text processing "serious"?
> Much of UNIX's userland was intended for text processing. And for that it works very well.
- wmf 15y agoIf UNIX utilities and pipes (including the pipe function in C) are a "failure", why are they still with us after so many years? I guess "us" means 1% of the population, since Mac/Windows users generally don't use the command line and the apps they do use aren't held together with pipes.
- sedq 15y agoTrue. And that may be what he meant by failure. If "everyone" isn't using them, then he considers them a "failure". What I observe however is that these utilities are not going to disappear, they are not going to be replaced; they will remain part of numerous operating systems "everyone" continues to use (maybe they'll be buried beneath the surface but they will still be there). And therefore they will be "with us" for a long time, because the people that _do_ use them are the ones that build and administer the systems for "everyone" else to use. If these utilities served no useful purpose, then I think we would get rid of them. Interesting about git. I was not aware it was built using the shell. CVS also began as a set of shell scripts. For me, nothing beats the shell for one-liners. I don't think of this as "prototyping", but I certainly wouldn't mind having some of my better scripts re-written in C. And given the choice I'd rather hack together a "prototype" using a shell than using some other scripting language, Java or whatever is the "most popular" prototyping environment.
- tikhonj 15y agoIt's rather pointless to talk about the greater population of users when considering whether a programming technology is pertinent. Sure, non-technical users don't use pipes. They also don't do any programming, and are completely apathetic regarding which programs they use outside of a few "core" ones like office or photoshop. In a word, whether Bob next door uses pipes or not is immaterial.
- wmf 15y agoMy point is that Office and Photoshop don't use pipes either (AFAIK). (BTW, how did sedq get banned within 3 hours of creating an account? This doesn't seem right.)
- qdog 15y agoI'm sure this topic is dead, but just so you know, kernel debugging for windows uses named pipes at least when VMware is involved. .NET added support for named pipes in release 3.5. Mac OS X seems to fully support pipes, too. I suspect pipes are used, but transparently by most programs that use them.