
Ask HN: Unix philosophy as a way to live - peter_retief
Does this philosophy influence your life style, your work and relationships? Quote: The Unix philosophy, originated by Ken Thompson, is a set of cultural norms and philosophical approaches to minimalist, modular software development.
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itamarst
The Unix _practice_ is anything but minimalist or modular, it's crazy, complex
and very crufty (notice it's talking about 38400 baud!):
[http://curiousthing.org/sigttin-sigttou-deep-dive-
linux](http://curiousthing.org/sigttin-sigttou-deep-dive-linux)

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borplk
Hell no. Unix philosophy is an empty naive dream.

It was good for its time but right now it can only seduce a young
inexperienced student with basic examples that fall apart quickly.

Oh look we can read a file with "cat" then we pipe it into "wc -l" to count
the lines just like this "cat file.txt | wc -l" WOW!

Isn't that a genius simple philosophy of "do one thing and do it well?".

It is, but only on a very shallow level.

It is a practice that actively encourages throwing away information. Mangling
it up in ad-hoc data structures then relying on more ad-hoc arbitrary text
parsing to extract the information.

Then you end up with "cat | awk | sed | tr | perl | kill-me-now --force |
bullshit --verbose | xargs crap 2>&1".

It creates problems then wants you to applaud it for solving them with crufty
tools?

No thank you.

It was nice for hobbyists sitting behind slow terminals saving keystrokes in
the 80s.

It's no longer appropriate today.

A huge percentage of the problems that we deal with today are "artificial"
because we have decided not to embrace sane universal methods of data
transport/transform at a core level.

So you just have to shovel things back and forth from one subsystem to
another.

Today I'd be impressed by a software system/philosophy where each component is
in perfect harmony with the others.

An operating system whose state, packages and configuration is stored and
managed via a proper database.

Programs that communicate with each other in structured form so every piece of
input and output that you need is right there for you to consume.

I could go on but that's enough for now. Phew.

~~~
kazinator
Alan Perlis, Epigram #34.

