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by twoodfin 350 days ago
Contemplating this, it’s too bad the Unix scripting ecosystem never evolved a tripartite symbiosis of ‘file‘, ‘lex‘, and ‘yacc‘, or similar tools.

That is, one tool to magically identify a file type, one to tokenize it based on that identification, one to correspondingly parse it. All in a streaming/pipe-friendly mode.

Would fit right in, other than the Unix prejudice (nonsensical from Day 0) for LF-separated text records as the “one true format”.
1 comments
kristopolous 350 days ago
I guess ... I don't think it really gets you much unless it's 1-pass streaming otherwise we're dealing with entire input buffers and then we're just back to files.

You could argue using the vertical separator | is more syntactically graceful but then it's just a shell argument. There's quite a few radically different shells out there these days like xonsh, murex, and nushell so if simply arranging logic on the screen in a different syntax is what you're looking for then that's probably the way.

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twoodfin 350 days ago
What I meant was something like the SAX streaming parse model disaggregated and broken into sniff / lex / parse phases all mediated by a modestly structured stream of the kind a tool like awk could process naturally.
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kristopolous 350 days ago
Right okay I ran into a very similar limitation in Unix recently.

It's really about multiplexed semantic routing.

There's no great tools, abstractions, jargon or syscalls for it.

I mean there's plenty for things like the networking stack, dbus, Wayland, and various audio stacks but they're all a pain to deal with.

Nobody has really figured it out. The list inputs, list outputs, create bridges and taps, assign properties, which is what everybody does is complicated.

I'm sure there's brilliant people that find this intuitive but for me it requires too much orchestration and feels brittle.

People see this in microservices as well.

There needs to be something as intuitive as the mouse drag (Raskin), Unix pipe (McIlroy) or drop down menu (Atkinson) to deal with this stuff.

All these "obvious" things had to be invented. There's something dumb and obvious here nobody's cracked yet

The primary problem is the concept of discovering such things has ossified and few people are experimenting on introducing new ones

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