The unix philisophy is when your program does 1 thing and does it well. For example Make does not do spaces well you should use a separate program for that or something

the XY problem is that i'm taking a makefile "list" and turning it into a javac classpath string, which requires separating different elements of the classpath with : (but with ; on Windows, just to spice up your life), and it has its own not-very-intuitive wildcard rules, and blah blah. i think the oils guy would call this a "mini language". java guys cooked up a little domain-specific language for "setting the classpath" because they want a list but the shell speaks text, not lists

@quat linear path traversal is a really fucked up design pattern in its own right that makes the assumption
(1) you want to specify general search locations alone and nothing more specific
(2) you do not require nor expect the ability to audit where an individual resource was loaded from
(3) you want a global priority ordering for every possible named resource, with no way to enforce uniqueness or avoid the priority ordering other than prepending yet another entry
(4) searching locations for resources and consuming the resource from the location should be the same operation
(5) the language runtime best knows how to link up filesystem paths to resources

@hipsterelectron i was thinking abt why javascript can sorta pull off the "multiple versions of a dependency in the same project" trick but java cannot do that by default & it's because every class has to be given a unique identifier...? like in node everything is just relative imports