Don't get caught up in the hype - the Zen of "The Unix Philosophy"

Tom Buskey tom at buskey.name
Thu Oct 28 10:04:30 EDT 2010


On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 7:37 AM, David Rysdam <david at rysdam.org> wrote:

> An agent or agents purporting to be Greg Rundlett (freephile) said:
> > I liked this post which in summary is a reminder of the Unix Philosophy
> > http://teddziuba.com/2010/10/taco-bell-programming.html
>

Some of it reminds me of Jon Bentley's(?) "Programming Pearls" series/books.



>
> ~95% of my coworkers would benefit from reading this essay.
>
> Right now they are busy setting up a 1000 node cluster.  I estimate
> that 900 of those nodes will be dedicated to JVMs, 90 to parsing XML
> messages from each other and the other 10 to actually solving the
> engineering problem at hand.
>
> (That said, I don't think xargs can launch processes on a remote
> machine, although maybe "./process" can.)
>

It's amazing how much you can do with rsh/ssh and a shared folder.  One
company used to tar up a directory of symbolic links (1MB tar file I think)
on a central server and untar it on 500 systems every night.  Reliably.

You will hit scaling issues.  Then you need to get more specialized, but
you'll understand more of the issues by prototyping in shell.  Sometimes the
prototype that solves 90% of the problem is good enough that you can defer
the other 10% until you solve that.



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