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Comment by njacobs5074 | Hacker News Reader

Inline with other comments here, I think that Mr Stephenson missed the point.

*nix operating systems were and continue to be successful because they are a complete and powerful toolbox for computing at all different levels.

And yes, if I had to identify a "Hole Hawg" of Unix it would probably be the `dd' command. But I certainly don't use it on a daily basis :)

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Came to make a similar comment. I think my main gripe with the Hole Hawg analogy is that it's one tool, not a bevy of tools. Unix is more like if you went and looked into the workshop of a Hole Hawg owner, catalogued all the other tools that person uses, and realized that they're all built to interact elegantly with each other.

(I've definitely had my share of being "spun around the hole" with accidental dd misfires.)

I don't think he missed the point. You should probably read all of this (which the Hole Hawg bit is an excerpt from) to a whole picture of this school of thought:

http://people.cs.georgetown.edu/~clay/classes/spring2010/os/...

dd is ironically just used as a bad replacement for cp in most cases.

There’s another construction analogy- the tendency to use the tool at hand vs “the right tool in the truck”. You use what you know and are familiar with without stopping to consider the alternatives (which you may not even know about - at least a tool in a truck is visible but when’s the last time you ran ls /bin).

(Milwaukee sells “demolition screwdrivers” designed to be used as prybars and chisels because that’s what people do with them: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Milwaukee-5-16-in-Slotted-6-in-D... - akin to modifying a program for the use case vs the original designed purpose).

Any long tool with a flat end is a prybar, some just happen to be able to screw screws as well!

In all seriousness, most enormous flathead screwdrivers are intentionally designed to work as a prying tool. Now, do that with an insulated screwdriver and you might as well prepare yourself for the cable whipping from your senior.

Free beer is highly successful go figure.

There is nothing about the UNIX command line that isn't done better by REPL based environments.

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