Moreover, something rarely mentioned, multiple processes and pipes can give you some free parallelism courtesy of the scheduler.
The downer is that every function call in this system has only string parameters.
Re:The Beauty of Unix Pipelines (2020)
by unsafecast on Sunday June 05, 2022 @06:29AM
(#31629683)
That's because this is the way they thought back then. You can trivially pass json data between processes and make a coherent structured system. Nobody does it though.
Re:The Beauty of Unix Pipelines (2020)
by a_conservative on Sunday June 05, 2022 @08:55AM
(#31630559)
jq has >20k stars on GitHub.
I use it mostly for little cli utilities, so maybe it isn’t an exact refutation of your claim.
Re:The Beauty of Unix Pipelines (2020)
by unsafecast on Sunday June 05, 2022 @11:03AM
(#31631581)
Sure, but I think the bigger problem is complete systems. Look at a usual Linux box. It has a bunch of files, all with their custom syntax, and you parse them with error-prone shell commands. If everything used json, everyone's lives would've been so much better.
Independent programs using json is a step in the right direction though.
Unix/Unixlike operating systems aren't perfect, but they get the job done.