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I'm just throwing out a quote to show why I enjoyed the book. """To do the Unix philosophy right, you have to be loyal to excellence. You have to believe that
by sounds 15y ago
I'm just throwing out a quote to show why I enjoyed the book.
"""To do the Unix philosophy right, you have to be loyal to excellence. You have to believe that software design is a craft worth all the intelligence, creativity, and passion you can muster.
Otherwise you won't look past the easy, stereotyped ways of approaching design and implementation; you'll rush into coding when you should be thinking. You'll carelessly complicate when you should be relentlessly simplifying — and then you'll wonder why your code bloats and debugging is so hard."""
(from the end of Chapter 1)
- Confusion 15y agoThis seems hard to reconcile with the commonly accepted notion that unix is an example of 'worse is better'.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- neilk 15y agoImperfection has better survival characteristics than perfection. The essay below describes how Unix won and LISP Machines faded away. http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
- Drbble 15y ago'Worse is better' means that simple and quick to market but flawed is better than complex and correct but slow to market. 'Complicated and flawed' has no place in that debate.
- aiscott 15y agoI love unix and composing operations. But I have a hard time thinking "excellence" when it comes to command line parameters of some of these tools. "inconsistent mish-mash" is what I think more often. It's a relatively minor gripe, but I believe legitimate none the less.
- ori_b 15y agoIt's interesting to see you say that, because the creators of Unix seem to feel the same way. See papers arguing against the addition of the '-v' option, the size and inelegance of the X window system, and so on.
- pjscott 15y agoThat's not really a gripe with the book, so much as with the designers of Unix who did not always do the Unix philosophy right. Yes, find(1), I'm looking at you.