why Unix?

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Thu, 09 Apr 2009 10:10:35 -0400, Jarrett Billingsley  
<jarrett.billingsley at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 3:17 AM, Alexander Pánek
> <alexander.panek at brainsware.org> wrote:
>>
>> The thing is, I don't *want* my _shell_ to be able to parse anything.  
>> It's a
>> shell, not a framework with everything and two kitchensinks built in to
>> parse every imaginable file format on my computer. That's the whole  
>> point of
>> the UNIX philosophy: small, encapsulated tools that do one or a few  
>> tasks
>> very well.
>
> The point is that Unix uses text (and parses text) because it forces
> you to make everything into a file.  One program has to spend a whole
> lot of effort producing nicely-formatted output, only to have it piped
> to another program which just undoes all that work.  Then you have
> "magical" files like the things in /proc where they query the OS for
> data and output it as text.  The point of Powershell is to keep the
> data in the format that it started as, avoiding all the annoying (and
> inefficient) transcoding to and from text files.

Yeah, somebody should make a d shell that shows us how it *really* should  
be done, then we might be convinced ;)

-Steve