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> There are groups of tools whose sole function is just to help stitch other commands together This is an example of the Unix philosophy working: replace smart
by fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
> There are groups of tools whose sole function is just to help stitch other commands together
This is an example of the Unix philosophy working: replace smarts in the tools with smart compositions of tools; i.e. don’t make programs have to determine whether to read file names from arguments or stdin, use arguments by default and `xargs` to convert stdin into arguments.
- salohcin 3y agoCompletely agree, but I think we get stuck in a loop at this point. Why don't we use the composition tools instead to take _structured data_ and make it print in a pretty fashion on screen, rather than pretty display data and have to compose tools to make it structured? We've still custom created smarts in the tools to do something, it's just that those smarts are dealing with printing the data to console in a pretty fashion (which was the priority at the time) rather than the manipulation and handling of the core data they have been created for. It's not necessarily a philosophy change, just a perspective/priority change. We less and less need to experiment and understand the systems, and more and more want to connect and streamline them.