Re:Software reuse is more like an organ transplant than snap...
by taneq on Thursday June 25, 2020 @02:27AM
(#23637498)
> I'm not a Unix purist or anything, but they really hit on something special when it came to "code talking to other code".
I agree, and it just hit me while reading your comment that the special thing is not just that you can plug any program into any other program. It's that if one program doesn't work cleanly with another, this enforced simplicity means that you can easily modify the output of one program to work with another program. Unix command-line programs aren't always directly composable but they're adaptable in a way that other interfaces aren't.
It's not great for infrastructure, don't get me wrong. This isn't nuts and bolts. It's putty. But often putty is all you need to funnel the flow of information this one time.
I agree, and it just hit me while reading your comment that the special thing is not just that you can plug any program into any other program. It's that if one program doesn't work cleanly with another, this enforced simplicity means that you can easily modify the output of one program to work with another program. Unix command-line programs aren't always directly composable but they're adaptable in a way that other interfaces aren't.
It's not great for infrastructure, don't get me wrong. This isn't nuts and bolts. It's putty. But often putty is all you need to funnel the flow of information this one time.