19 May
2024
19 May
'24
12:07 a.m.
I just revisited this ironic echo of Mies van der Rohe's aphorism, "Less is
more".
% less --help | wc
298
Last time I looked, the line count was about 220. Bloat is self-catalyzing.
What prompted me to look was another disheartening discovery. The "small
special tool" Gnu diff has a 95-page manual! And it doesn't cover the
option I was looking up (-h). To be fair, the manual includes related
programs like diff3(1), sdiff(1) and patch(1), but the original manual for
each fit on one page.
Doug