[TUHS] [OT] Re: earliest Unix roff

[Larry McVoy]

On Thu, Sep 19, 2019 at 05:46:13PM -0400, Steve Nickolas wrote:
> On Thu, 19 Sep 2019, Arthur Krewat wrote:
> 
> >Serious question:
> >
> >Which is better, creating a whole new binary to put in /usr/bin to do a
> >single task, or add a flag to cat?
> >
> >Which is better, a proliferation of binaries w/standalone source code, or
> >a single code tree that can handle slightly different tasks and save
> >space?
> >
> >:)
> >
> >art k.
> 
> I would argue that the more "Unix" way to do it is have the multiple
> binaries.  One job, one tool, and chain them together to make bigger tools.

That worked when we were running on 64K machines.  Modern machines do
a lot more and the problem space is not always a pipeline.

You aren't going to write a web server by spawning 

	cat | encrypt | http_servlet

That doesn't scale.  At all.