

The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature - saurabh
http://theody.net/elements.html

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10ren
After coding parsers, my English became a little more refined (or possibly,
just my interpretation of my grammatical decisions become a little more
refined): I had said "one can reuse code as a platform or library", but
realized that that could imply that I thought those two were different names
for the same thing, and this ambiguity could be avoided by "one can reuse code
as a platform or a library".

This was precisely the grammatical issue that came up in my parsing code
(actually for fields that can hold a choice of types). Of course it's no
surprise - Chomsky is a linguist - but such an absolutely direct connection
between programming and speaking was striking to me.

An interesting point in the article is that GUI's have become synonymous with
constrained choice. Constrained choice can be a good and useful thing, but a
graphical representation is potentially much freer than text (consider an
image of text in photoshop). I think the closest we have to this in common use
is hierarchical tree views (as in vim's NERDTree, or java's JTree, or in
windows directories), but they are still very constrained. We could have free-
floating graphs with arcs and nodes everywhere; or handwritten algebra; or
even active diagrams! (not sure what that would be!). But we don't. I think
it's partly because the mouse is great for pointing; not so great for drawing.
You really need a pen tablet (which many artists use), or.... a multi-touch
screen. People, I think there's a deep opportunity here to change everything.

I've long been curious about Perl's growth... did it in fact grow more
strongly in NT than unix? It was the best linguistic tool around with no real
competition at all, unlike in unix (BTW Wall: also a linguist). Did this then
form a stronghold, from which to launch back into Unix? It's an appealingly
logical adoption path.

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mmc
What a great essay, if out of date - I suppose maybe Windows' PowerShell might
have changed his opinion of NT?

I wonder if the whiff of elitism he mentions is still a reason for people to
avoid UNIX, or if the availability of Linux has changed that.

~~~
cparedes
I would wager that he might grant some charity to PowerShell, but still hold
onto his thesis. AFAIK, you operate on objects in PS, rather than parsing
clear text in UNIX. PS is a much more powerful way to do things, but it seems
that the UNIX way is much more grounded in human language than the Windows
way, whether it be through a GUI or through PS.

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balding_n_tired
Years ago I worked with a government techie, a fellow who had written a
masters thesis on W.B. Yeats. One day, as we were discussing the dim prospects
for the line of proprietary minicomputers we worked with, he said, "Jim, I
think we're fastened to a dying animal."
(<http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/3847.html>)

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donaq
Did the fact that I enjoyed the essay mean that I read the essay right or that
the author read me right?

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knowledgesale
I sense parody but can't retrieve the source.

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onan_barbarian
You are not expected to understand this.

