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Comment by lapinot | Hacker News Reader

Someone discovered unix philosophy. (1) do one thing and do it well; (2) promote composition (write primitives, let people script). To add a pessimistic tone tho, bloat is benefic because the more things you pack the quicker one will break, leading the consumer to buy your upgrade. Also: mega-apps favor vendor lock-in (the reciprocate also being true). Ok i just realized that second piece of unix philosophy is deeply anti-monopolistic; too bad the capitalistic game (especially the last XaaS plateform-capitalism trend) incentivizes complete market domination. I'm amused to see how well these guidelines can be framed in an anti-capitalistic ideology when the people at bell labs who wrote them (or the journalists from hbr) probably didn't think like that at all.

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So you recommend carrying a Phone, Camera, GPS device, music player, laptop, barometer, torch etc. instead of one Phone as long as all o/p in text.

(1) i never talked about text mode (2) i never talked about smartphones, which specifically occur in other threads. It's easy demolishing straw-men. Yet i don't want a car with a screen, i fridge with a clock, a watch with a microphone. I could go on for several pages. Btw are you serious with that barometer?

My phone is a worse music player than my 2007 iPod was. Less storage, much lower battery life, slower UI. It doesn't have streaming but the Euler diagram of 'times when I want to use a music player' and 'times when I don't have LTE' is almost circular.

Unix does nothing well - including composition, which totally fails with most non-text data types.

Unix was bodged together with nails and a glue gun using offcuts and left-overs from more sophisticated operating systems. It's the proverbial jack-of-all-trades OS.

But it's a step hill to climb for new users. My first year of CS involved an intricate shell assignment and took a considerable time investment. Ultimately I also leveraged a lot of Bash (one, feature-rich tool) for large parts.

The days of dropping kids in front of a text prompt and expecting them to figure it out are over.

I don't think bash is feature rich: you have to call a program to do arithmetic! It's BASIC with pipes. If you really want to script in a unix-traditional way you should go for perl i guess. Also: i didn't want to imply going text-mode, scripting probably is going to be keyboard-driven but you may have graphical composition too. Tiling window managers usually get this "graphical shell" right by letting you choose/replace most components (status bar, window decorations, keybindings, launcher-menu, notification viewer). And about learning curve: i think we should really acknowledge that with any tool either you go fast or you go far. I'm not sure what's so unusual about struggling with a programming assignment in first year when for most other things of life it usually takes something from a couple years to a decade to be considered "good enough to stop learning" (or maybe start advanced training) (writing, basic math, music, sport, craft).

Maybe if we got them started earlier than college CS, it would be easier.

I learned how to use the MSDOS prompt growing up as a teenager. Most of my programming was done in an IDE, though -- including the first few years of my career. I had also worked a little bit with Linux command line, so I wasn't completely unfamiliar.

At age 26, I joined FAANG and was forced to adapt to developing in Linux 100% of the time. The transition wasn't difficult. I felt comfortable with the Linux command line after a few months, with some help from coworkers and Stack Overflow searches when necessary.

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