alt Hacker NewsI’ve been reading “The Unix Programming Environment”. It’s made me realize how much can be accomplished with a few basic tools and files (mostly plain text). I want to spend some time thinking of what a modern equivalent would look like. For example, what would Slack look like if it was file (and text) oriented and UNIXy? Well, UNIX had a primitive live chat in the form of live inter-user messaging. I’d love to see a move back to simpler systems that composed well.
Unix gave the world a lot of good ideas about architecture, but I think it really hamstrung itself by treating all the data as plain text and resisting the idea of having any kind of structured, formatted data passed within a pipeline. It's nice to be able to serialize to something human-readable and -editable, but constantly re-parsing and re-formatting it becomes a real pain.