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Comment by vilhelm_s | Hacker News Reader

I don't think there is such a sharp distinction between writing and using tools. You could take the 9-command pipeline, paste it into a shellscript, and now you have a new tool.

And isn't this how most programming is done? Typically your program relies on a set of libraries, but the methodology of writing the library looks very similar to the methodology of writing the client code; at the end of the day, it's all programming.

If literate programming is great, then I would expect it would be great everywhere. And if decomposing your program into a few steps and piping together already-written software for those steps is great, then I would expect you should try to use that style of programming as widely as possible.

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When the task was to make a tool, the criticism should not be that there are other tools to do this.

So, yeah. If you want a chair, you just go buy a chair. But if you are curious if a method of furniture making is good, you don't take as evidence someone that orders a chair from a catalog.

> you don't take as evidence someone that orders a chair from a catalog.

That's misrepresenting what's going on.

A better parallel is that the person curious about furniture-making still isn't doing everything from scratch. They're gonna go buy wood and tools - they're not creating an axe, hammer, screwdriver, screws, nails, chopping down a tree, and shaping the wood themselves. The furniture-maker is still following the unix philosophy of using and building on prior work.

Depends how you read it. He offered to demonstrate a tool, literate programming. The task he was asked to demonstrate against was counting words. He was not asked to count words, that is different.

It was a purposely pedagogical exercise to demonstrate literate programming. Which is itself a pedagogical method to write a program.

To that end, reading his program you can learn about how he wrote his program. Reading the shell script can really just learn how the program was written. If you don't know what those commands do, you will not learn it from the script. I don't know Pascal, but most of the other still makes sense to me. Such that I could probably port it. The shell script?

Now, again, if the task is just to count the words, you are probably fine with whatever crosses the finish line. If the task is to demonstrate literate programming? How does that help?

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