[Scubabear68]

Trying to be as kind as possible in my interpretation of the article, my take was that the author got stock on the "spherical cow" analogy early on and couldn't let it go. I think there are nuggets of good ideas here which generally tries to talk to leaky abstractions and impedance mis-matches in general between hardware and software, but the author was stuck in spherical cow mode and the words all warped toward that flawed analogy.

This is a great example of why rewrites are often important, in both English essays and blogs as well as in software development. Don't get wedded to an idea too early, and if evidence starts piling up that you're going down a bad path, be fearless and don't be afraid of a partial or even total rewrite from the ground up.

[froh]

yes. and the two nuggets I took were looking a Unix pipe as a concurrent processing notation and pointing out that the Unix R&D for great notations (or the communication thereof?) stopped right before splitting, cloning and merging concurrent streams. I've rarely seen scripts nicely setting up a DAG of named pipes. I'm not aware of a Unix standard tool that would organize a larger such DAG and make it maintainable and easily to debug.

assuming pointing at a problem counts as nugget.