
Unix for Poets (2013) [pdf] - signa11
https://www.cs.upc.edu/~padro/Unixforpoets.pdf
======
b215826
This is an excellent article. However, note that if you're using tr from GNU
Coreutils, you have to use the 'A-Za-z' syntax for character ranges instead of
'[A-Z][a-z]', since GNU tr doesn't use the SysV syntax [1]:

    
    
      GNU `tr' does not support the System V syntax that uses square
      brackets to enclose ranges.  Translations specified in that format
      sometimes work as expected, since the brackets are often
      transliterated to themselves.  However, they should be avoided
      because they sometimes behave unexpectedly.  For example, `tr -d
      '[0-9]'' deletes brackets as well as digits.
    

[1]:
[https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/Char...](https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/Character-
sets.html)

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jboynyc
I'm a big fan of Allison Parrish's work using word embeddings and other
techniques to write computer-generated poetry.

[http://portfolio.decontextualize.com/](http://portfolio.decontextualize.com/)

~~~
suyash
wow, this is mind blowing, thanks for sharing!

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ableal
_" I did a quick search in Alta Vista on Netscape"_ (footnote, page 2)

Sounds more like 1998 than 2013 ...

P.S. Actually 1994:
[https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=E6aqGvYAAAAJ&hl=en](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=E6aqGvYAAAAJ&hl=en)

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noufalibrahim
This is a lovely article. I used various ideas from here and other sources to
make a little tutorial which was intended to explain the power of
composability of small programs to a student audience. The details are here
[https://thelycaeum.in/blog/2013/09/03/text_processing_in_uni...](https://thelycaeum.in/blog/2013/09/03/text_processing_in_unix/)

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linsomniac
Back in the mid '90s, I'd put it at 1995, there was a Hypercard bit of Unix-
related poetry that I've never been able to find again. I believe it was an
"ABC of Unix" sort of thing, with a poem or story for each letter. I recall
the one about grep involving a woman whispering into her lovers ear how grep
outputs matching lines unless -v is provided.

It was lovely, or at least my memory of it was that it was lovely. I've looked
for it again over the decades, but I wonder if it was lost to HyperCard rot...

~~~
jonjacky
[http://www.redballoon.net/humor/unix1.txt](http://www.redballoon.net/humor/unix1.txt)

A is for Awk, which runs like a snail, and B is for Biff, which reads all your
mail. ...

but the grep entry here is different from what you remember.

~~~
linsomniac
That one I'm very familiar with. :-) This was something entirely different...

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woudsma
Made me think of
[https://www.emilio.com.mx/pdf/Code_Poems_2012.pdf](https://www.emilio.com.mx/pdf/Code_Poems_2012.pdf)

~~~
jboynyc
Is it valid literary criticism to point out pointless uses of cat on page 25?

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dang
Related from 2016:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11901790](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11901790)

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plwg
My three favourite words in the title at the same time?

~~~
saagarjha
I’m not sure I’d put a preposition in my shortlist of favorite words, but you
do you I guess…

~~~
frutiger
The third “word” might be PDF?

~~~
mchobbes
Or “2013”

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earthboundkid
The misuse of smart quotes in the code example is very distracting to me
because backticks mean something in Unix.

