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Comment by raylu | Hacker News Reader

How 'bout we just go with the unix philosophy and let you build these things yourself so that they have a chance of actually working?

Yes, I'm saying you should use IRC.

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I could build them myself and then watch them break over time, or I could pay someone else to do it, and have more time to build things that I really want to build. That's the point of SaaS.

And when you want something that isn't being built for you? You _can't_ build it yourself at that point because there's no text interface to consume.

My complaint isn't so much against SaaS as a whole as it is against things that violate the Unix philosophy. I'm against things that try to do many complex tasks and don't provide a simple text interface (or RESTful API or whatever).

The tradeoff is you get basic features all at once with little overhead. What you lose is any ability whatsoever to make other things work on top of the service/program/application/whatever you're using.

The reason this is always bad is because you're only a first time user once; you pay the startup/integration/setup/whatever cost once. After that, you're a user and you get to suffer under the poor or non-existent integrations forever. See also: http://xkcd.com/1205/

All of his points work just fine for me in Hipchat, except possibly the third bullet depending on what exactly you need. Hipchat does have search, though.

I think that's true for most things that don't follow the Unix philosophy and try to do too much. "Everything just works all the time, unless this and except for that sometimes depending on this but you can that."

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