[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Armstrong_(programmer) Joe Armstrong, of Erlang fame, so his blog posts have been discussed in the past.
[1] https://ntdotdev.wordpress.com/2023/01/01/state-of-the-windo...
I find this a helpful example. When I've heard the unix philosophy in the past, I didn't feel super convinced. Like, sure tar can do one thing, because it is a library (ignore that it can use gzip). But, where do you draw the line with a program like gnucash (financial tracking software) ? The core of the domain will involve keeping a ledger of transactions and converting them to relevant units. But, typing credit card charges in by hand is tedious [2], the kind of tedious that a computer should be good at. I would much rather that the program connect to my bank [3], to get the transactions directly.
[2] https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/Inventorie...
[3] https://beanhub.io/blog/2024/06/24/introduction-of-beanhub-c...
- a text file (with an undefined character encoding)
- an undefined structure for the header of the file
- a rule that status must be 'open' or 'closed' in every human head
- a revision control system which dates changes
- a filesystem, terminal, multi-user OS, shell (piping, globbing, environment variables), grep, wc
- an out of band way to request and obtain permission to change the owner, possibly a high-trust environment with no arguing "you agreed" "no I didn't"
- a programmer/scripter who can develop the management reports on-demand
smalltorch•3d ago