- We never figured out how to package programs properly (Nix needs to become easier to use)
- For all kinds of smaller tasks we practically need to use those Unix tools
- Those everywhere tools are for hysterical raisins hard to use in a larger context (The Unix Philosophy in practice: use these five different tools but keep in mind that they are each different from each other across six dimensions and also they have defaults from the 70’s or 80’s)
- For a lot of “simple” things you need to remember the simple thing plus eight comments (on the StackOverflow answer which has 166 votes but that’s just because it was the first to answer the question) with nuance like “this won’t work for your coworker on Mac”
- So you don’t: you go to SO (see previous) and use snippets (see first point: we don’t know how to package programs, this is the best we got)
- This works fine until Google Search decides that you are too reliant on it for it to have to work well
- Now you don’t use “random stuff from StackOverflow” which can at least have an audit trail: now you use random weights from your LLM in order to make “simple” solutions (six Unix tools in a small Bash script which you can’t read because Bash is hard)
This is pretty much the opposite of what inspired me when studying computer science and programming.
> We never figured out how to package programs properly
What the issue with apt, pacman, and the others? I think they’re doing their job fine.
> For all kinds of smaller tasks we practically need to use those Unix tools
I mean, they’re good for what they do
> Those everywhere tools are for hysterical raisins hard to use in a larger context
Because each does a universal task you may want to do in the unix world of files and stream of texts.
> For a lot of “simple” things you need to remember the simple thing plus eight comments
No, you just need the manuals. And there are books too. And yes the difference between BSD and GNU is not obvious at first glance. But they’re different software worked on by different people.
- We never figured out how to package programs properly (Nix needs to become easier to use)
- For all kinds of smaller tasks we practically need to use those Unix tools
- Those everywhere tools are for hysterical raisins hard to use in a larger context (The Unix Philosophy in practice: use these five different tools but keep in mind that they are each different from each other across six dimensions and also they have defaults from the 70’s or 80’s)
- For a lot of “simple” things you need to remember the simple thing plus eight comments (on the StackOverflow answer which has 166 votes but that’s just because it was the first to answer the question) with nuance like “this won’t work for your coworker on Mac”
- So you don’t: you go to SO (see previous) and use snippets (see first point: we don’t know how to package programs, this is the best we got)
- This works fine until Google Search decides that you are too reliant on it for it to have to work well
- Now you don’t use “random stuff from StackOverflow” which can at least have an audit trail: now you use random weights from your LLM in order to make “simple” solutions (six Unix tools in a small Bash script which you can’t read because Bash is hard)
This is pretty much the opposite of what inspired me when studying computer science and programming.