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What was the origin of the idea that the Unix philosophy is "do one thing and do it well"? If anything, the UNIX philosophy is more like "do one thing, and do

What was the origin of the idea that the Unix philosophy is "do one thing and do it well"? If anything, the UNIX philosophy is more like "do one thing, and do it to a text file".

TylerE 4y ago
do one thing, and do it with a file handle.
- jbverschoor 4y ago
  aka functional
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    Really though?
dementis 4y ago
If you look at the wiki on the UNIX philosophy it does say "Store data in flat text files" and "Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface." You can do a surprising amount with flat files. For decades HP / HPE has been using flat files for Serviceguard / SGLX which is a high-availability cluster software that gets used in some very large Enterprise environments.
- a1369209993 4y ago
  > You can do a surprising amount with flat files. For example, tables in relational databases like sqlite are representationally isomorphic to tabular files like the output from `ls -al`. Sqlite has a lot of useful performance optimizations (including eg, not having to encode strings as "\x20" or the like if you want arbitrary bytes), but those come at the cost of a data format that you can't easily (not even notice that you needed to and did) reverse engineer, when either writing new software to consume or emit it, or even just visually inspecting it in a editor that doesn't already speak that format.
- Avshalom 4y ago
  you can do anything with (flat|text) files, they are after all just an often inefficient binary encoding the same as any other binary blob. The main thing you can do with them though, is tell yourself that you don't really need a spec or documentation because you can just eyeball the output, and not having to follow a spec makes things feel simple.
dctoedt 4y ago
> What was the origin of the idea that the Unix philosophy is "do one thing and do it well"? Relatedly: Brian Kernighan's Unix: A History and a Memoir was an enjoyable read. https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/dp/1695978552 https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/d... (not an affiliate link).

What was the origin of the idea that the Unix philosophy is "do one thing and do it well"? If anything, the UNIX philosophy is more like "do one thing, and do it to a text file".

TylerE 4y ago

do one thing, and do it with a file handle.

jbverschoor 4y ago
aka functional
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  Really though?

dementis 4y ago

If you look at the wiki on the UNIX philosophy it does say "Store data in flat text files" and "Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface." You can do a surprising amount with flat files. For decades HP / HPE has been using flat files for Serviceguard / SGLX which is a high-availability cluster software that gets used in some very large Enterprise environments.

a1369209993 4y ago
> You can do a surprising amount with flat files. For example, tables in relational databases like sqlite are representationally isomorphic to tabular files like the output from `ls -al`. Sqlite has a lot of useful performance optimizations (including eg, not having to encode strings as "\x20" or the like if you want arbitrary bytes), but those come at the cost of a data format that you can't easily (not even notice that you needed to and did) reverse engineer, when either writing new software to consume or emit it, or even just visually inspecting it in a editor that doesn't already speak that format.
Avshalom 4y ago
you can do anything with (flat|text) files, they are after all just an often inefficient binary encoding the same as any other binary blob. The main thing you can do with them though, is tell yourself that you don't really need a spec or documentation because you can just eyeball the output, and not having to follow a spec makes things feel simple.

dctoedt 4y ago

> What was the origin of the idea that the Unix philosophy is "do one thing and do it well"? Relatedly: Brian Kernighan's Unix: A History and a Memoir was an enjoyable read. https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/dp/1695978552 https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/d... (not an affiliate link).