Re: [LUG] Nice little Linux based media player device

[Gordon Henderson <gordon+dcglug@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 6 Nov 2009, Paul Sutton wrote:

> > > Go back to the original unix philosophy: Do one thing and do it well.
> > Haven't got that many pockets.
>
> Unless you interpret the above as,  each unix command does 1 thing,

Yes

>  but
> it does it really well, with lots of parameters,

No. Very few parameters.

> add that to lots of
> unix commands, each of which do 1 thing, but again with lots of
> parameters, and the ability to pipe output / input around, you end up
> with a powerful system.

Each unix command used to do just one thing - with very few parameters and 
the did it very well. You made complex commands by piping simple commands 
together.

Unix pipes and input/output redirection are what made it all powerfull in 
the early days. Modern lazy programmers are now to blame for the current 
state of bloat.

In the begining, commands were simple and had few parameters. So you want 
to list your files - use the ls command. You want them sorted? ls | sort. 
Sorted by filesize? ls -l | sort -nk 5 ... (or du -s | sort -n) (You want 
to Convert and Copy a tape? use the dd command becuase cc was already 
taken)

and so on.

Users got lazy and programers bloated ls by giving it sort code.

Well - that's maybe not a good example, but that's the general point. Why 
add the -S option to ls when there's a perfecly good sort command already 
there..

It's all creep, slowly slowly, but over the years most commands have 
gotten bigger and bigger as the use of the command-line has diminished. 
Users get lazy - or worse, never taught these things in the first place, 
so they never learn about the beauty of simplicity and the power of stdio 
redirection.

When I wur a lad, the first Unix system I play with had 128Kwords of 
16-bit core memory (ie 256KB) on a 16-bit processor (pdp11) and that 
supported half a dozen users on glass teletypes doing editing, document 
preparation, program compiling (Pascal & C) and so on. I'm not after going 
back to those days, but an example of how far we've come is that todays ls 
command occupies 96KB on disk - that would have been unthinkable back 
then. (and that's just the half of it - we didn't have dynamic library 
linking then either!)

but maybe it's just me... :)

Gordon


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