What Programmers Can Learn from Modular Synthesis and Unix | Hacker News Reader

What Programmers Can Learn from Modular Synthesis and Unix

nora.codes

37 pointsNoraCodes5 comments

This is a unique way to think about it. My issue with the Unix way of doings things, though, is the user unfriendliness/large amount of weirdly-named commands/syntax and one letter flags that make reading other people’s code hard. It doesn’t help that shell script syntax is also finicky/strange compared to other programming languages. With physical things like synthesizers, you can reason about things spatially/physically, understanding each component in a way that is hard to do with unix programs with dozens of flags and slight incompatibilities between platforms.

Still, Unix is good. I just wish there was a system that provided this kind of modular toolkit for software in an easy to pick up format without worrying about backwards compatibility with generations of Unix systems and the quirks of those past systems, hard to describe environments, and scattered config files/complex build processes. I think some form of a standard structured data format and some kind of type-checking at an OS level would be neat, too.

Powershell, for example, tries to address these points by naming commands more verbosely, having verbose flags and even having programs input and output object-y data instead of just plain text.

These are all nice ideas that don't work very well in practice because the verbosity is only beneficial when writing scripts and is just cumbersome for interactive use. Also, Linux (and other Unix-likes in general) are better designed to be used w/ scripted and cli tools, and the object nature of IO often just gets in the way. But the biggest issue is that the built-in tools just arent as powerful as POSIX core utilities and especially GNU-extended ones.

> These are all nice ideas that don't work very well in practice

Yeah I agree with what you said about Powershell, but I think there is a balance. Some Unix programs have the ‘—-‘ style verbose flags, which is good. However, I would argue that the overall Unix-like environment fails all the time and causes massive, needless headaches, not just because of syntax/flag name lengths, but because libraries and config files are stored all over the place, depending on implicit features of the environment. I guess my main point is that Unix is like death by one thousand cuts; it is modular/composable/flexible, but in an extremely haphazard and janky way that makes developing in it painful in ways it doesn’t have to be. We haven’t really seen the ideas I was talking about in practice (e.g. optional typechecking between programs), so it’s not really clear how they’d end up working out. But there has to be a better way than the Unix way (as it is right now).

There is nothing correct in those observations.

>These are all nice ideas that don't work very well in practice

Cmon people, stop repeating this nonsense. You have both in powershell.

> and the object nature of IO often just gets in the way.

??!

Object nature of pipeline is one Out-String away from arcane way.

And to complete the circle, newer Moogs are full blown, hackable Linux-powered analog synths.

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