[TUHS] [COFF] Re: On Bloat and the Idea of Small Specialized Tools

[Alexis]

> On Sat, May 11, 2024 at 2:35 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso at mit.edu> 
> wrote:
>
> So while some of us old farts might be bemoaning the death of 
> the
> Unix
> philosophy, perhaps part of the reality is that the Unix 
> philosophy
> were ideal for a simpler time, but might not be as good of a fit
> today

Hm .... i guess it might depend on the specific use-case(s) 
involved?

At one point i realised that a primary reason i enjoy using *n*x 
systems is that they're fundamentally 
_text-oriented_. (Unsurprisingly, of course, given the context in 
which Unix was developed.) i spend a lot of my time interacting 
and working with text, and *n*x systems provide me with many 
useful tools for this. Quoting the old "UNIX As Literature" piece, 
https://theody.net/elements.html:

"[T]he most recurrent complaint was that [Unix] was too 
text-oriented. People really hated the command line, with all the 
utilities, obscure flags, and arguments they had to memorize. They 
hated all the typing. One mislaid character and you had to start 
over. Interestingly, this complaint came most often from users of 
the GUI-laden Macintosh or Windows platforms. ...

"[A] suspiciously high proportion of my UNIX colleagues had 
already developed, in some prior career, a comfort and fluency 
with text and printed words. ...

"With UNIX, text — on the command line, STDIN, STDOUT, STDERR — is 
the primary interface mechanism: UNIX system utilities are a sort 
of Lego construction set for word-smiths. Pipes and filters 
connect one utility to the next, text flows invisibly 
between. Working with a shell, awk/lex derivatives, or the utility 
set is literally a word dance."

Perl, with its pervasive regex-based functionality and extensive 
Unicode support, fits neatly into this. i find regexes an 
_incredibly_ powerful tool for working with text, whether via 
Perl, sed, awk, or whatever. But my experience is that many people 
treat regexes as an anathema, with Zawinski's "Now you have two 
problems" regularly trotted out as a thought-terminating 
cliché. Sure, regexes can, and do, get used where they shouldn't 
be[a]; that doesn't mean the baby should be thrown out with the 
bathwater. 

But if one is only working with text under sufferance, trying to 
avoid it via substantially more graphically-oriented environments, 
the text-based "Unix philosophy" and the tools associated with it 
might feel (and actually be) much less appropriate and 
useful. Fair enough. The Unix construction set will still be there 
for those of us who find them very appropriate and tremendously 
useful.


Alexis.

[a] It seems unlikely that anyone on this list hasn't already seen 
this, but just in case:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454

i'm looking forward to that comment sending OpenAI over the 
Mountains of Madness.