I remember a number of years ago I was setting up a shared access shell machine, and came across the idea of piping pine directly into the IMAP server via domai

I remember a number of years ago I was setting up a shared access shell machine, and came across the idea of piping pine directly into the IMAP server via domain sockets, in an on-demand fashion. It was a revelatory experience for me in the Unix way, seeing how interchangeable TCP, domain sockets, and files are in general. Even this article's example is quite a bit more abstracted than the simplest case in ruby (which itself is quite a bit more abstracted than what you can do with building blocks like `nc` and `echo`). Being able to see that 'socket / file duality' is one the best observational powers a network-facing developer can have. It's also one of the biggest worries I have about HTTP 2.0.