On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 12:55:32PM -0600, Derek Martin wrote: > Another way to look at it, if you think that the above idea is > stretching the Unix Philosophy beyond what was intended (which it very > arguably is), is that the Unix philosoply is about 4 decades old, and > software (and users) have long since evolved to a point where it just > doesn't always make sense. For an application like e-mail, there *is* > a lot of functionality that needs covering. You can either write one > monolithic application to handle it all in a consistent way, or you > can stick with the ancient philosophy and glue all the bits together > in a way that, for my money, eventually gets pretty clunky, or at the > very least requires a lot of user effort to get it all working. The > small pieces each have their own interface, which often doesn't play > well with other peices without some coercing, unless they were > designed from the beginning to work together.
It sounds to me like you may be confusing two ideas. One idea is a way of assembling an application from small programs that perform discrete tasks in a script or pipeline. The other idea is a user's experience that an application came with "some assembly required." There is not any reason that an application that is sophisticated and complete cannot be assembled from small parts. You can distribute a sophisticated and complete application fully assembled, no matter how many pieces form it. The advantage that assembling an application in the "UNIX-y" way has over a monolithic application is that the parts can usually be disassembled and reassembled for the purposes of testing, automation, creating new and improving old applications. Dave -- David Young OJC Technologies dyo...@ojctech.com Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933
