Lauren Weinstein3d ago

There are basically two ways to look at the fact that we're still using many of the same command line tools today that originated on UNIX of around half a century ago:

1) Serious stagnation
2) Ken and Dennis and the rest of the gang in the Bell Labs MH1127 lab, etc. got it right

L

Show threadSharp Cheddar Goblin3d ago

@lauren I think we can credit this to core UNIX philosophy (your point #2):

- Write programs that do one thing and do it well.
- Write programs to work together.
- Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

Show threadThomas Lee ✅ 
@SharpCheddarGoblin @lauren #Powershell embraced, but extended those patterns to piping of Objects (emitted and consumed by cmdlets) to be superior to piping text. It minimizes some of the need for tools like sed, awk, grep.
Mar 21 at 1:14pmWeb
Show threadSharp Cheddar Goblin2d ago
@DoctorDNS @lauren I'd dispute the "superior" claim there. And when it comes to capitalism, there's always the aspiration to "extinguish" after the "embrace and extend".
Show threadThomas Lee ✅ 2d ago
@SharpCheddarGoblin @lauren from an it pro perspective, object piping is better than text. With text, you need to parse it. I suck at regular expressions and don't know awk and sed. With objects, you know what you are getting, avoiding the parsing. Unix and it's Shells did all the heavy lifting conceptually. We just improved it a bit to suit the audience.