Tool approach [LWN.net]

Tool approach

Posted Sep 22, 2005 0:39 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)
In reply to: Tool approach by hppnq
Parent article: Five Pitfalls of Linux Sockets Programming (developerWorks)

Your quote is preceded by this ominous remark: "What Unix does well isn't what people want" So pray tell me, what is the lesson to be learned from not being able to diff two PowerPoint files?!

People actually use PowerPoint files, and maybe they would like at some point to find the difference between two such files. I know I have felt similar needs with. So Unix cannot find the difference between some binary files, which is what people want. So maybe the publisher of PowerPoint should provide a "diff" tool, or change the format (which is IMHO what Pike hints at); or we should not use such abominations. Then if you use e.g. SVG you can diff two files; but you have to know the format well to understand the diff, and people do not want to learn complex formats.

As for the Netscape example: [...] This, in fact, reaches a level of stupidity that makes it hard to believe Rob Pike wrote this.

Keep in mind that Pike is writing about "the good, the bad and the ugly". Regular expressions have good, bad and ugly points.

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Tool approach

Posted Sep 22, 2005 5:06 UTC (Thu) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link]

So Unix cannot find the difference between some binary files, which is what people want.

That pretty much sums it up, don't you see? First, "Unix" has nothing to do with it, "Unix" couldn't find anything if its life depended on it. In any case "Unix" was not conceived so it could find the differences between PowerPoint files (which is more or less what Pike is saying of course), but then why would one expect such functionality? Because diff is part of the Unix heritage?!

Sure, people use and depend upon graphical interfaces more than they did in 1970. And of course traditional Unixisms like pipes tend not to interface well with GUIs. Anyone who is of the opinion, that, because of this, there is something wrong with Unix, must be quite short-sighted.

Personally, I find it amazing that the same system that started out as a platform for grep and diff is now effortlessly running OpenOffice on PowerPoint files. And it seems to me that the Internet is living proof of the immense success of the sockets implementation on Unix systems, for that matter. Unix is exactly what I want. ;-)

Tool approach

Posted Sep 22, 2005 6:18 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

Yes, I think I see the same thing: the original ideas that were fit for a stream of characters (cat, diff, grep) are not that good for a world of graphical interfaces, complex hierarchical objects and roaming networking. Of course there is nothing wrong with the Unix heritage!

But we do not agree on what follows from there: you say that Unix is exactly what you want. Pike seems to say that Unix might (even should) be extended to encompass this new world of ours. And why not?

Tool approach

Posted Sep 22, 2005 7:54 UTC (Thu) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link]

I think it eventually boils down to what development model one believes in. I happen to think that evolution is the way to go. Which almost inevitably leads to compromises when trying to make subsystems play together nicely, especially if they have no common heritage.

The funny thing is, of course, that one of the more sensible remarks in the presentation is the observation that interfaces only work at some level and in some context. So I wouldn't draw the conclusion that there is something wrong with the Unix model, because dammit, I can't "cat homepage.html | netscape | sort". I happily accept this, because netscape's interfaces to me and to the world are optimized for the purpose of browsing, which is what I usually want when firing up a browser.

By the way, there are plenty of examples where both networking and GUIs are interfaced with the more traditional Unix way of working, or one wouldn't be able to implement a webserver in Korn shell or use scripting languages like Tcl/Tk.

Tool approach

Posted Sep 22, 2005 8:15 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

I think it eventually boils down to what development model one believes in. I happen to think that evolution is the way to go.

The world is clearly on your side, since we are all using Linux and very few people use Plan 9; I'm not planning to use Plan 9! But the inertia still amazes me.