On 25/02/2021 16:54, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
On Thu, 25 Feb 2021 at 10:07, J Martin Rushton
<martinrushton56@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:martinrushton56@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>>
wrote:
On 25/02/2021 14:49, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, 25 Feb 2021 at 09:13, J Martin Rushton via CentOS
> <centos@xxxxxxxxxx <mailto:centos@xxxxxxxxxx>
<mailto:centos@xxxxxxxxxx <mailto:centos@xxxxxxxxxx>>> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 25/02/2021 13:37, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
>
> I was recently looking at Raymond's book "The Art of UNIX
Programming"
> from 2003. He, along with contributors Thompson (inventor of
UNIX),
> Kernigham (C and AWK), Korn and others of that callibre, espouse
> creating "little tools" that do one job reliably and well. The
> likes of
> Gnome or systemd certainly would never fit into this
philosophy. I
> really think we have lost a lot of maintainability and ease of
> management over the last 20 years as applications are
stretched to do
> ever more.
>
>
> Maybe but everytime someone says "I think these are too complex"
they
> then turn around and say "but I really need this to do this one more
> thing." Also the complexity of tools is generational. The oldschool
> 1970's Unix people were screaming that the 1980's software was too
> complex because various flags had been added to central commands.
The
> 1980's people complained that even early Linux was too complex
because
> it had so much more software that depended on each other. And so
forth.
>
> In the X11 world, there were as many people saying FVWM was way too
> complex when twm was all you needed and it was making software
too hard
> to build. BUT could you get twm to work on our new monitor which
has a
> different view screen feature that made the fonts look like crap.
>
> The counter argument I heard from a 1970's Unix era person was
"Software
> gets more complicated over time as we find that more problems
need to be
> solved. You either keep up with it, or get out of software." He was
> working in software until his death a short while ago in his 80's.
>
> --
> J Martin Rushton MBCS
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>
>
> --
> Stephen J Smoogen.
>
The irony being that moving to UNIX I had it drummed into me that the
one tool-one job ethos was a great advance upon the rigidly defined and
integrated monolith of VMS. Oh, and that was in the 1990s.
--
J Martin Rushton MBCS
And everyone I worked with told me that Unix was a poor reinvention of
TSX-11 where you could get real work done. But since VMS came out over a
decade after Unix, I can't say Unix is an advance over VMS.
In any case this is devolving into the 4 Yorkshiremen skit so I am done
here.
--
Stephen J Smoogen.
Oi! Lay off Yorkshiremen. It'll only be envy that you weren't born one. :-)
--
J Martin Rushton MBCS
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