3 ms·
One of the few living oldschool UNIX legends still alive. Here is when he was young: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0 https://www.youtube.com/watch
by shevy-java 8mo ago
One of the few living oldschool UNIX legends still alive.
Here is when he was young:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0
Kind of explains in an epic manner why pipes were useful back then.
They are still useful, but computers are so much more powerful that
many techniques back then came primarily because their computers were
not as powerful. I still, oddly enough, prefer the hardware of the
1970s, 1980s, almost early 1990s too. Today's hardware is much better,
but I am nowhere as interested in it; it is now just like a common
tool.
- PaulDavisThe1st 8mo agoThe Unix command-line composition-via-pipes workflow has no particular connection to hardware capabilities whatsoever. foo | bar | baz is useful whether you have a 25Mhz uniprocessor or 1024 cores running at 8GHz. It is true that the unix pipe model is explicitly designed around text as the data format, and it is true that there's lot of data on computers in 2026 that is not sensibly represented as text. But there's also lots that is, and so the pipe model continues to be valuable and powerful.
- jacquesm 8mo agoThere is an interesting parallel between 'foo | bar | baz' and 'baz(bar(foo()))'. They all transform and are composable.