Comment by _Donny | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _Donny | Hacker News Reader

I understand that the article is about how many developers are inclined to use wrong "hammers" for certain tasks.

However, it also makes me think about how we actually code. At my university, we learn to sort files, parse data-structures, model various data formats, etc.

But in most UNIX systems, we already have the basic building blocks in the form of simple programs that do one thing, very well. Will programming ever evolve from programming languages to more complex building blocks in the form of programs combined with pipes in the bash terminal?

> Will programming ever evolve from programming languages to more complex building blocks in the form of programs combined with pipes in the bash terminal?

Fundamentally, UNIX "programs combined with pipes" are equivalent to function calls.

  sort foo | uniq

is equivalent to

  uniq(sort(foo));

Shell is nothing but a programming language/environment optimized for fast input and immediate, stateful execution. If you seek evolution of programming to higher levels of abstraction, this isn't the place. Command line interfaces work at the same abstraction level as regular programming in a high-level language.

Well, some programming languages encourage that kind of design by emphasizing message passing. You even get piping between functions in languages like Elixir.

> Will programming ever evolve from programming languages to more complex building blocks in the form of programs combined with pipes in the bash terminal?

1) A bash script

or

2) Those are called libraries.

Microservices?

No bash though

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