why Unix?

[Jarrett Billingsley]

On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 11:09 AM, Christopher Wright <dhasenan at gmail.com> wrote:

> In this regard, Unix has a standard interface: text. This turns out to be
> usable >90% of the time. It has the advantage that you can write a program
> in any language that can process text. But it has disadvantages, too.

Sure, as long as you're comfortable using a slew of
incredibly-hard-to-read (and hard to write) domain-specific languages,
e.g. sed, grep, and to a large extent Perl.  Even if you're fluent in
those languages, you still have to know what the format of the data is
that they're parsing, and what all the pieces mean.