
The Elements Of Style: Unix As Literature (1998) - pykello
http://theody.net/elements.html
======
UNIXgod
"Unix is simple. It just takes a genius to understand its simplicity." –
Dennis Ritchie

As someone who has been shell programming for the most of their life; I really
enjoyed that article. At the local ruby group I am invited to talk frequently
on automation and depending on the group; remind the current generation on the
sheer power they have at their fingertips.

It really is an empowering operating system. Yielding power of the user with
minimal tokens and dependencies provides it's elegance and beauty in
simplicity.

~~~
jfb
I've been using Unix in some form or another since maybe 1986. It is an
enormously effective lever. But the grody cruft isn't getting better --
there's an upper boundary on how happy I can be using it, but it's an
aesthetic and not a technical one.

Partly this is nostalgia, and partly it's diminishing marginal returns.
Nothing that happens to me is going to be as jarring a leap into the future as
sitting down in front of a PC RT was, and I guess that's sad.

~~~
UNIXgod
I read your "[http://homonculus.net/blog/2012/11/11/what-shell-should-i-
us...](http://homonculus.net/blog/2012/11/11/what-shell-should-i-use/) post. I
wanted to comment though you may or may not be interested. I use ash (Almquist
Sh) for my 'non-interactive' script executions. For interactive flow I use
zsh. For root on my BSD boxes I use tcsh and bash on my Funtoo boxes simply
because I don't care to alter or customize the root account. I would be
interested in what your inferring to with reference to `grody cruft`.

------
pagekicker
See Neal Stephenson's IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE COMMAND LINE. It's all symbol
manipulation.

~~~
npsimons
Full text: <http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html>

TL;DR:

"Unix is the Hole Hawg of operating systems, and Unix hackers, like Doug
Barnes and the guy in the Dilbert cartoon and many of the other people who
populate Silicon Valley, are like contractor's sons who grew up using only
Hole Hawgs. They might use Apple/Microsoft OSes to write letters, play video
games, or balance their checkbooks, but they cannot really bring themselves to
take these operating systems seriously."

~~~
dredmorbius
That whole essay is eminently quotable. You've picked up one of my two
favorite sections (with "Ronald Reagan is your Web browser" being a close
third).

Describing operating systems, using the inevitable automobile analogy. Windows
(mopeds, crappy station wagons, and lumbering SUVs), Apple (stylish Euro-
sedans), BeOS (batmobiles), and ...

"Linux ... is not a business at all. It's a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and
geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The people who
live there are making tanks. These are not old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet
tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S. Army, made of space-age
materials and jammed with sophisticated technology from one end to the other.
But they are better than Army tanks. They've been modified in such a way that
they never, ever break down, are light and maneuverable enough to use on
ordinary streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact car. These tanks are
being cranked out, on the spot, at a terrific pace, and a vast number of them
are lined up along the edge of the road with keys in the ignition. Anyone who
wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free."

------
NoodleIncident
Huh. I'm a Linux-using, liberal-arts CS major and I had no idea that this was
even a thing.

I suspect that a large part of this trend is pragmatism vs idealism. From what
I hear of days gone by, using *nix wasn't ever really a pragmatic decision. It
may suck to be boxed into a GUI, but an engineer might be more inclined to
make the compromise and get the job done than a liberal arts major.

~~~
UNIXgod
His references where mainly to *BSD and Bell Labs UNIX. In 1998 the open
source ecosystem was something everyone was looking at from artisans to
engineers. Also the landscape was different as we where all inside an economic
bubble at the time whereas the article explores the discontent of
administering Microsoft products over working with the shell and posix system
utilities.

------
waynecochran
The couldn't even spell 'creat' right!

~~~
saraid216
> The

Really, now.

~~~
waynecochran
I saw that right after I posted... kept it for irony sake.

------
lotsofcows
cat file | grep searchterm ? Really? <shivers>

~~~
aaronblohowiak
reads better than `<file grep searchterm` and is minimally wasteful.

~~~
gknoy
I think the point was that you could write it with no io redirections, since
grep lets you pass a filename as an argument:

grep pattern file

