3 ms·

Is your PaaS composable or contextual?

18 points by iProject 14y ago

Jonanin 14y ago
The author clames that contextual interfaces require too much knowledge and understanding even to do trivial things, and then cites this as a good example of a composable architecture: tr -cs A-Za-z '\n' | tr A-Z a-z | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | sed ${1}q That is neither simple nor easily learned.
- typicalrunt 14y ago
  I agree that it's not easily learned, but once learned, it can be simple. Until then, it looks complex. I certainly wouldn't give this to my grandmother as a solution. However, for anyone with the ability to learn a technical command line operation, the thinking goes like this: first i want to convert the output into another format, then another format, then sort it, find a count of the uniques... and so on. It reads very easy because each tool is doing one thing in the chain.
- dllthomas 14y ago
  Each of these are commands that operate independently on a stream. Each is well documented, trivially composable, and reusable. The only difficulty, in learning shell scripting well enough to trivially whip up things like the above for problems (like this one) that it fits well, is in becoming aware of the existence of utilities that may do what you want. The apropos command can help quite a bit, but it can sometimes be hard to come up with a word to search for, for sure - I recall once having quite some trouble finding "column", even knowing of its existence. But that's more the exception than the rule, and one can often find ways of pressing utilities one knows well into service in a pinch.
- barkmadley 14y ago
  I think the simplicity comes from being able to learn each piece in isolation, without any loss of generality. In addition, once each piece is learned, it does not need to be used in isolation, meaning each piece learned multiplies the abilities of the learner, as opposed to merely adding to it.
wmf 14y ago
As an aside, I think the difference between the title and URL of this article provides an interesting lesson in editing.

18 points by iProject 14y ago

The author clames that contextual interfaces require too much knowledge and understanding even to do trivial things, and then cites this as a good example of a composable architecture: tr -cs A-Za-z '\n' | tr A-Z a-z | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | sed ${1}q That is neither simple nor easily learned.

typicalrunt 14y ago
I agree that it's not easily learned, but once learned, it can be simple. Until then, it looks complex. I certainly wouldn't give this to my grandmother as a solution. However, for anyone with the ability to learn a technical command line operation, the thinking goes like this: first i want to convert the output into another format, then another format, then sort it, find a count of the uniques... and so on. It reads very easy because each tool is doing one thing in the chain.
dllthomas 14y ago
Each of these are commands that operate independently on a stream. Each is well documented, trivially composable, and reusable. The only difficulty, in learning shell scripting well enough to trivially whip up things like the above for problems (like this one) that it fits well, is in becoming aware of the existence of utilities that may do what you want. The apropos command can help quite a bit, but it can sometimes be hard to come up with a word to search for, for sure - I recall once having quite some trouble finding "column", even knowing of its existence. But that's more the exception than the rule, and one can often find ways of pressing utilities one knows well into service in a pinch.
barkmadley 14y ago
I think the simplicity comes from being able to learn each piece in isolation, without any loss of generality. In addition, once each piece is learned, it does not need to be used in isolation, meaning each piece learned multiplies the abilities of the learner, as opposed to merely adding to it.

wmf 14y ago

As an aside, I think the difference between the title and URL of this article provides an interesting lesson in editing.