On Jul 11, 7:39 pm, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 12:21 AM, sturlamolden <sturlamol...@yahoo.no> wrote: > > You are probably aware that Unix and Unix customers have been around > > since the 1970s. I would expect the paradigm to be changed by now. > > The paradigm of small tools that do exactly what they're supposed to, > and can be combined? Nope. There's still a philosophy of services that > fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, rather than expecting each > application to do everything you want it to. A standard Unix command > line might consist of three or more tools, piping from one into > another - grep the Apache log for lines containing the name of a PHP > script, pipe that into awk to pick up just the user name, IP address, > and date (without time), then pipe into uniq (deliberately without > first going through sort) to show who's been using the script lately. > And then piped it through sed to clean up the format a bit. Yep, > that's something I did recently. > > Point to note: This is the Unix *philosophy* versus the Windows > *philosophy*, not Unix *programs* versus Windows *programs*. There are > Windows programs that follow the Unix philosophy. > > ChrisA
The intention of programming is to close the semantic gap. ------------- It is a fundamental task of software engineering to close the gap between application specific knowledge and technically doable formalization. For this purpose domain specific (high-level) knowledge must be transferred into an algorithm and its parameters (low-level). (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_gap ------------- A gui-builder reduces the semantic gap by showing a widget when the programmer things 'widget.' Banging out hundreds of lines in vi/emacs for the same purpose does a measurably poorer job. Note it can reduce but not close. By choosing fidelity to the gui we have corresponding less fidelity to the algos and data-structures [And one may assume that someone even using a gui toolkit wants to do something with the gui and not just paint the screen] Still it seems a bit naive to suggest that building a gui by a few point&clicks is 'windows-model' and banging out hundreds of lines in vi/emacs is 'unix-model.' It does disservice to python and to unix. If a student of mine came and said: Is Python better or Unix? he would receive a dressing down. And yet more than one person here seems to think such type-wrong comparisons are ok. I find this disturbing... -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
