[lapinot]

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.

[vegasdew]

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.

[lapinot]

(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?

[kurtisc]

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.

[TheOtherHobbes]

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.

[paulryanrogers]

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.

[lapinot]

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).

[eecsninja]

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.