
How the Unix philosophy gave us “web apps” instead of “software” - awwstn
https://capiche.com/e/app-replaced-software
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FlyMoreRockets
This article misses a big part of the Unix philosophy. Modularity and
extensibility are just as important as do only one thing and do it well. Unix
works because a lot of small programs can be chained (piped) together to
interoperate. Apps often don't do this very well or at all.

~~~
avmich
> Underpinning it all is the 2nd Unix philosophy of text outputs, so the data
> one app exports can be imported by another. That’s how you can export your
> address book from Outlook and import it into Gmail, and it’s the same
> principle that lets web APIs connect software with built-in integrations and
> connection tools like Zapier, IFTTT, Segment, and more.

Looks like author mentioned that. I guess, the change is in the name - and
perception.

~~~
FlyMoreRockets
Certainly in perception. In the Unix philosophy, interoperability is central
to the function of the program. It seems to me that apps only have this added
as a secondary function, if at all. You can't easily fork an email stream so
that part of your incoming mail goes to Outlook and part to Gmail, say based
on subject or sender.

~~~
Bjartr
Depending on what you consider "easy" that could be untrue. If you used your
public email address as "ingress" you could auto-forward to zapier, which
would in turn forward to a gmail only address or an outlook only address
conditionally.

It's a little tedious to set up, but no code has to be written.

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amw-zero
I kind of, very minimally understand the comparison. But it doesn’t hold up on
any dimension. As a thought experiment, could you write a script that tied
together “web apps” that only invoked the apps through some kind of interface?
No you can’t because they don’t have a uniform interface.

The fact that (some) web apps transmit data via an API, which is text, doesn’t
mean that text is their primary interface.

Also, what web application does just one thing today? The most popular ones
are absolute seas of features. Unix commands also became fairly poor at
sticking to this, but nowhere near to the level of web apps.

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lazyjones
That "web-apps built around collaboration" played a major role, is clearly
wrong, web-apps have plenty of defensive mechanisms that prevent flexible use
from within programs (i.e. bots) or reuse of the output (scraping).

The web was simply a working cross-platform and usable over the network
environment despite the bad performance, additional hardware (connectivity)
requirements and developers found these advantages significant enough to
prefer building web-apps over desktop equivalents. Unfortunately, because
major websites are still a PITA to use and [would] greatly benefit from native
implementations (FB, Twitter, Youtube...).

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qqj
Calling Unix philosophy a ״philosophy” is being overly generous. It’s a
mindset shared by many early computing hackers, propagated through the times
because it’s simple and easy enough to follow. See “worse is better” for why
this has been a detriment for the software industry.

As for webapps, they have nothing to do with unix philosophy and much more to
do with Steve Jobs, iphone apps and too many non technical product managers
angling to push out “products” (also an aspect of the whole MVP and ship early
mentality)

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MurrayHill1980
Why should it matter that much whether people search for "app" or "software"?
There are different types of programs. There are big desktop programs. There
are useful mobile device programs of all sizes and shapes. There are games
that run on various devices.

The market shows that people like free stuff and cheap little programs
('exercise workout timer on your iphone') but will pay for a zillion features
(AutoCAD, Lightroom, Tableau, the AWS ecosystem are examples).

Even the variants of Unix tools with a lot of features seem to have won in the
marketplace of ideas.

