[TUHS] Discuss of style and design of computer programs from a user standpoint

William Cheswick ches at cheswick.com
Mon May 8 04:50:52 AEST 2017


> On 7May 2017, at 2:19 PM, Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> 
> Not genius. Experience.

It’s the pipe that was genius.  When I first heard the idea, I thought it was preposterous. My
programs’ outputs were designed for the line printer, with carriage control characters.  How
could this idea be useful?

These tools are powerful--I co-founded a company out of network probe software mostly designed
around filters.   And it scales beautifully to multi-core computing.  I had movie visualization software
suddenly nearly double in speed one day.  They had doubled the number of CPUs in the ferric cluster.

My favorite filter:  the unsort (or scramble) command.  
Honeyman’s “idiom” command:
sort | uniq -c | sort -rn




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