Over the decades I’ve seen the praise and critique of the “Unix way”. I don’t remember reading about the aspect I’ll describe below. This might be a banality, and I haven’t invested much thought into it either. I’m just curious to hear your opinions.
At the core of the Unix way is that tools should do just one thing. Users very often need results that can only be achieved after doing several things. With only single-purpose tools at hand, users have to integrate them. In other words, the tool authors delegate integration to the users.
Here’s the idea I want to discuss. In programming languages, integrating various modules to achieve a goal is already a complex task because we often have to handle numerous failure modes and edge cases. In shell scripts this is much worse, since shells are more limited than programming languages. Writing a tool that does only one thing looks like avoiding the most complicated task. Which leads to a conclusion that the Unix way only works well in a rather small fraction of use cases; the majority of cases are better served by different approaches.
What do you think?
I’m confused what you’re trying to say here. It sounds like you are trying to say that unix philosophy fails to address the difficulty of actually composing and integrating the simple primitives provided by GNU/Linux. But you could say that for any programming language.
Unless you are saying that the shell should have intermediate tools that are more specialized than the primitives. Like libraries or frameworks built on shell primitives. But I think for that sort of complexity, shell scripts are too slow and counterintuitive, and you should just use a proper programming language, like all the other complex specialized cli tools in the Linux ecosystem (nmcli, systemd, etc).
I see shell primitives as relics of the past, and I treat them like you might treat the buttons on a GUI. There’s a button for copying items called
cp, a button for moving items calledmv, etc. I rarely compose these tools into complex scripts, and I almost never write bash scripts longer than like 10 lines. For any sort of complexity I use Python or Go.It looks like we have the same idea about these simple programs, so my post doesn’t need to convince you of anything. I know the feeling of confusion in such situations.