Tool approach

Tool approach

Posted Sep 22, 2005 7:54 UTC (Thu) by hppnq (guest, #14462)
In reply to: Tool approach by man_ls
Parent article: Five Pitfalls of Linux Sockets Programming (developerWorks)

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.

---

(Log in to post comments)