16 Oct
2017
16 Oct
'17
8:54 p.m.
On Mon, Oct 16, 2017 at 1:52 PM, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
On Mon, Oct 16, 2017 at 12:39 PM, Jon Steinhart
<jon(a)fourwinds.com> wrote:
This is an aside, but I must admit -- with a sense of mild shame --
that the '-v' option to cat is one that I use with some regularity.
The irony is that I probably would not have done so had it NOT been
for the aforementioned paper, which made me aware of it (and how ugly
it is). That is, whenever I want to do the sort of thing that 'cat -v'
does, I remember that paper and think to myself, "oh yeah...`cat -v`
does that."
The suggested alternative of a special-purpose tool never struck me as
satisfactory since such a tool did not exist as a matter of course on
the multitude of machines that I might log into, and/or I didn't have
time or was too lazy to write it myself. Cue segue to lamentation of
the loss of systems promoting a network-aware filesystem namespace
where such things could be written once and then follow me around....
- Dan C.
I have a similar and maybe even more extreme
position. When I was a
manager
I placed restrictions on the tools and customizations for members of my
team.
My goal was to make sure that any team member could go over to any other
team
member's desk and get stuff done.
And I think this loops back to what started some of this threat. The idea
of a programmer with 'good taste.'
Rob (and Brian) railed on BSD in cat -v considered harmful and ‘Program
Design in the UNIX Environment’ (pdf version, ps version) but the points in
it was then and are still now, fresh: What is it that you need to get the
job done - to me, that is Doug's "Universal Unix" concept.