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

[Douglas McIlroy]

I just revisited this ironic echo of Mies van der Rohe's aphorism, "Less is
more".
       % less --help | wc
      298
Last time I looked, the line count was about 220. Bloat is self-catalyzing.

What prompted me to look was another disheartening discovery. The "small
special tool" Gnu diff has a 95-page manual!  And it doesn't cover the
option I was looking up (-h). To be fair, the manual includes related
programs like diff3(1), sdiff(1) and patch(1), but the original manual for
each fit on one page.

Doug
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