[TUHS] Re: [COFF] Re: On Bloat and the Idea of Small Specialized Tools

Hm .... i guess it might depend on the specific use-case(s) involved? At one point i realised that a primary reason i enjoy using *n*x systems is that they're fundamentally _text-oriented_. (Unsurprisingly, of course, given the context in which Unix was developed.) i spend a lot of my time interacting and working with text, and *n*x systems provide me with many useful tools for this. Quoting the old "UNIX As Literature" piece, https://theody.net/elements.html: "[T]he most recurrent complaint was that [Unix] was too text-oriented. People really hated the command line, with all the utilities, obscure flags, and arguments they had to memorize. They hated all the typing. One mislaid character and you had to start over. Interestingly, this complaint came most often from users of the GUI-laden Macintosh or Windows platforms. ... "[A] suspiciously high proportion of my UNIX colleagues had already developed, in some prior career, a comfort and fluency with text and printed words. ... "With UNIX, text — on the command line, STDIN, STDOUT, STDERR — is the primary interface mechanism: UNIX system utilities are a sort of Lego construction set for word-smiths. Pipes and filters connect one utility to the next, text flows invisibly between. Working with a shell, awk/lex derivatives, or the utility set is literally a word dance." Perl, with its pervasive regex-based functionality and extensive Unicode support, fits neatly into this. i find regexes an _incredibly_ powerful tool for working with text, whether via Perl, sed, awk, or whatever. But my experience is that many people treat regexes as an anathema, with Zawinski's "Now you have two problems" regularly trotted out as a thought-terminating cliché. Sure, regexes can, and do, get used where they shouldn't be[a]; that doesn't mean the baby should be thrown out with the bathwater. But if one is only working with text under sufferance, trying to avoid it via substantially more graphically-oriented environments, the text-based "Unix philosophy" and the tools associated with it might feel (and actually be) much less appropriate and useful. Fair enough. The Unix construction set will still be there for those of us who find them very appropriate and tremendously useful. Alexis. [a] It seems unlikely that anyone on this list hasn't already seen this, but just in case: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xh… i'm looking forward to that comment sending OpenAI over the Mountains of Madness.