3 ms·
I believe the main corner was Unix itself. "Everything is a file" is not a lesson, it is an imposition that with some some things that are very different to f
by cladopa 3y ago
I believe the main corner was Unix itself.
"Everything is a file" is not a lesson, it is an imposition that with some some things that are very different to files it is a very wrong thing.
The lesson is: Minimise as much as possible the different interfaces necessary and reuse them. Interlisp or Lisp machines used Expressions so everything could be read and written by everything.
Unix is a mess of binary formats, a mess of different console emulator formats, a mess of different text formats.
And the article is just about one guy who does not like Wayland not using files for everything, which is fine for me.
- gpderetta 3y ago> Minimise as much as possible the different interfaces necessary and reuse them. Very very strongly agree. As a corollary a small number of too simple interfaces is better than a larger number of more sophisticate interfaces. "It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than to have 10 functions operate on 10 data structures." - Alan Perlis' Epigrams on Programming (1982).