On Thu, Feb 25, 2021 at 02:12:39PM +0000, J Martin Rushton via CentOS wrote: > I was recently looking at Raymond's book "The Art of UNIX Programming" from > 2003. He, along with contributors Thompson (inventor of UNIX), Kernigham (C > and AWK), Korn and others of that callibre, espouse creating "little tools" > that do one job reliably and well. The likes of Gnome or systemd certainly > would never fit into this philosophy. I really think we have lost a lot of > maintainability and ease of management over the last 20 years as > applications are stretched to do ever more. If every tool we used were self-contained, build-it-all-from-scratch, our desktops would be a huge mess. Nothing would work with another tool, you'd have widely varying user interfaces, you'd never have something like X11 or Wayland. Sure, that attitude is fine for command line tools, but a huge part of the open source world is taking advantage of toolkits provided to make life easier for the programmer. The world is a lot more complicated than in the K&R days. When I worked at Princeton, Kernighan was teaching courses using Python (and Go now, I think). (Really cool guy) Heck, 'systemd' is a really complicated beast, but it doesn't have a huge number of interconnected dependencies. I think bringing it up isn't really appropriate for this thread, since it actually does a pretty good job of keeping the requirements down, so it can run in minimal instances. -- Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>