3 ms·

Exactly How I feel. We are adding up abstraction over abstraction, backwards compatibility, hardware compatibility, software compatibility, unrelated ui/ux feat

by fsniper 12y ago

Exactly How I feel. We are adding up abstraction over abstraction, backwards compatibility, hardware compatibility, software compatibility, unrelated ui/ux features, animations.. I believe modern computing has 80/20 rule in a bad way. We use 80 percent of the computing power to do unrelated 20 percent of the job. we need to re-find Unix philosophy for modern day computing. Software should do a single task but do it well. Also have a look at Zawinski's Law. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski.27s_law_of_software_envelopment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski.27s_law...

maxerickson 12y ago
I wonder how much of the Unix philosophy is accidental success. 'Do one thing well' is a (relatively) easy way to make something that actually works correctly, so I guess I'm wondering if doing one thing is actually important, or if actually doing something in a consistent, reliable and predictable way is the more important aspect. (Small programs that enable composition are great, but so is, for example, a program that can uncompress any format in place with only an option or two)
- valarauca1 12y ago
  The Unix Philosophy is an attitude not a philosophy. Unix doesn’t have a philosophy: it has an attitude. An attitude that says a simple, half-done job is more virtuous than a complex,well-executed one. An attitude that asserts the programmer’s time is more important than the user’s time, even if there are thousands of users for every programmer. It’s an attitude that praises the lowest common denominator • Small is beautiful. • 10 percent of the work solves 90 percent of the problems. • When faced with a choice, do whatever is simpler. Which sounds good until realize that these comments mean the exact same thing. • A small program is more desirable than a program that is functional or correct. • A shoddy job is perfectly acceptable. • When faced with a choice, cop out.
ygra 12y ago
And when you need to glue lots of things together that do just a single task, you end up spending much more (development and run) time at the joints, as in, constantly converting and parsing data again.
- fsniper 12y ago
  Unix pipes are very effective I believe.
  - blt 12y ago
    right, because you don't have to parse data coming over a pipe. :rolleyes:
  - PeterisP 12y ago
    Serializing and deserializing heavily structured data in order to fit over a unix pipe takes a lot of effort - I'm often doing things where the reading and writing data takes up more code and processing time than the actual processing, which is simple once the data is in a sane data structure, not in a stream. If your data structure is "a line of text, repeated x times" or "a blob representing an image", then unix pipes are very effective. For most everything else, they're not.

by fsniper 12y ago

maxerickson 12y ago

I wonder how much of the Unix philosophy is accidental success. 'Do one thing well' is a (relatively) easy way to make something that actually works correctly, so I guess I'm wondering if doing one thing is actually important, or if actually doing something in a consistent, reliable and predictable way is the more important aspect. (Small programs that enable composition are great, but so is, for example, a program that can uncompress any format in place with only an option or two)

valarauca1 12y ago
The Unix Philosophy is an attitude not a philosophy. Unix doesn’t have a philosophy: it has an attitude. An attitude that says a simple, half-done job is more virtuous than a complex,well-executed one. An attitude that asserts the programmer’s time is more important than the user’s time, even if there are thousands of users for every programmer. It’s an attitude that praises the lowest common denominator • Small is beautiful. • 10 percent of the work solves 90 percent of the problems. • When faced with a choice, do whatever is simpler. Which sounds good until realize that these comments mean the exact same thing. • A small program is more desirable than a program that is functional or correct. • A shoddy job is perfectly acceptable. • When faced with a choice, cop out.

ygra 12y ago

And when you need to glue lots of things together that do just a single task, you end up spending much more (development and run) time at the joints, as in, constantly converting and parsing data again.

fsniper 12y ago
Unix pipes are very effective I believe.
- blt 12y ago
  right, because you don't have to parse data coming over a pipe. :rolleyes:
- PeterisP 12y ago
  Serializing and deserializing heavily structured data in order to fit over a unix pipe takes a lot of effort - I'm often doing things where the reading and writing data takes up more code and processing time than the actual processing, which is simple once the data is in a sane data structure, not in a stream. If your data structure is "a line of text, repeated x times" or "a blob representing an image", then unix pipes are very effective. For most everything else, they're not.