On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 17:25, Eric Raymond <esr@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Commands that are simpler
> to mentally model, because they don't have a lot of exception cases,
> are better.
The UNIX philosophy: "Provide mechanism, not policy."
Some goofball touched upon this subject in a little-read book called
"The Art of Unix Programming", specifically:
What Unix Gets Wrong
http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch01s04.html
...
But the cost of the mechanism-not-policy
approach is that when the user can set policy,
the user must set policy. Nontechnical end-users
frequently find Unix's profusion of options and
interface styles overwhelming and retreat to
systems that at least pretend to offer them
simplicity.
In the short term, Unix's laissez-faire approach
may lose it a good many nontechnical users. In
the long term, however, it may turn out that this
‘mistake’ confers a critical advantage — because
policy tends to have a short lifetime, mechanism
a long one. Today's fashion in interface look-and-feel
too often becomes tomorrow's evolutionary dead
end (as people using obsolete X toolkits will tell
you with some feeling!). So the flip side of the flip
side is that the “mechanism, not policy” philosophy
may enable Unix to renew its relevance long after
competitors more tied to one set of policy or
interface choices have faded from view.[6]
:-D
Sincerely,
Michael Witten
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html