On 25/02/2021 14:49, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
On Thu, 25 Feb 2021 at 09:13, J Martin Rushton via CentOS
<centos@centos.org <mailto:centos@centos.org>> 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
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