Unix Programming - Re: The Nature of the "Unix Philosophy" (long)

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Author Re: The Nature of the "Unix Philosophy" (long)
Stephen Sprunk

2006-06-13, 1:23 pm

"Andrew" <hawk007@flight.us> wrote in message
news:1150216766.239909.127740@p79g2000cwp.googlegroups.com...
> Xah Lee wrote:
>
> How would such software rate on the "modular is good" scale?
>
> "many small programs" seems to suggest modularity. If so, what makes
> this "student software" undesirable, in spite of its (perhaps pseudo-)
> modularity?


I agree with all your other comments, but I'd like to add a bit here...

OSS (and the base Unix OS) tends towards lots of little tools that the user
can combine to solve any problem, provided he can figure out how to use each
of them individually (or even which tools to use).

Commercial software tends towards one huge tool that can be used to
accomplish pre-planned tasks with virtually no training, but which is
difficult to use for (if not completely incapable of) solving new tasks.

Of course, there's plenty of exceptions, but those are definite trends.

S

--
Stephen Sprunk "Stupid people surround themselves with smart
CCIE #3723 people. Smart people surround themselves with
K5SSS smart people who disagree with them." --Aaron Sorkin


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