

Note on Unix Philosophy - sonic0002
http://pixelstech.net/article/index.php?id=1336304966

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chris_wot
Yeah, nice analogy. Pity they ruined it with the whole Russian pen analogy.
The Russians used pencils, sure, but it's never mentioned that a. they used
the Fisher Space Pen also, and b. there were fire dangers and problems with
zero gravity and lead flying around a spacecraft.

I largely agree with KISS, but like the space pencil analogy, it doesn't
always match to reality.

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diminish
The article does not obey to the KISS principle neither and neither the
forward reference to the pencil cliché's answer.

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etanol
The NASA pen story, is it real or just a myth? In an attempt to answer myself,
I found this:

<http://history.nasa.gov/spacepen.html>

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mmcconnell1618
I was just watching a show about the design of the lunar descent module.
Grumman put the spaceship on a giant gimbal and rotated it through 360 degrees
in all directions to make sure there was nothing loose to become floating
debris. An astronaut could swallow or breath in anything loose like a metal
shaving. Perhaps NASA wanted a pen because the chances of a loose glob of ink
were significantly less than a broken pencil tip floating into someone's eye.

I agree with the article that sometimes simple is best but only when simple
isn't too simple for the job.

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chris_wot
That's actually one of the reasons that led pencils were dangerous. There was
also a problem with fire danger in a 100% oxygen environment.

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delinka
I was looking for notes and commentary, not simply a restating of UNIX
principles.

