article

do one thing

[WHAT]

] by Mike Loukides - radar.oreilly.com - Mike laments on the fall of the unix philosophy of apps and the resulting rise of convergance apps buttressed beyind wall gardens.

[WHY]

] I don't want barely distinguishable tools that are mediocre at everything; I want tools that do one thing and do it well.

[WHERE]

] READ THE FULL ARTICLE

] http://radar.oreilly.com/2015/10/do-one-thing.html

[WHEN]

] 2015-10-30

[EXAMPLE]

] I’ve been lamenting the demise of the Unix philosophy: tools should do one thing, and do it well. The ability to connect many small tools is better than having a single tool that does everything poorly.
] That philosophy was great, but hasn’t survived into the Web age. Unfortunately, nothing better has come along to replace it. Instead, we have “convergence”: a lot of tools converging on doing all the same things poorly.
] The poster child for this blight is Evernote. I started using Evernote because it did an excellent job of solving one problem. I’d take notes at a conference or a meeting, or add someone to my phone list, and have to distribute those files by hand from my laptop to my desktop, to my tablets, to my phone, and to any and all other machines that I might use.
] But as time has progressed, Evernote has added many other features. Some I might have a use for, but they’re implemented poorly; others I’d rather not have, thank you. I’ve tried sharing Evernote notes with other users: they did a good job of convincing me not to use them.
] While this might sound like an Evernote rant (all right, it is), the problem isn’t just Evernote. Everything is turning into an indistinguishable mush. Gmail was a pretty good Web-based email client, and it does a great job of eliminating spam. But when you add chat, when you add connections to hangouts, when you add interfaces to the calendar, when you add pop-up pictures of your email contacts, it becomes just one more ill-defined mess.
] I could say the same about just about every tool I use. Whether it’s Skype, Twitter, Google Docs, Flickr, or something else, everything seems to be converging into a single application that doesn’t do anything well, but does everything poorly.
] reason - Unix has pipes, which make it easy to build complex applications from chains of simpler commands. On the Web, nobody may know you’re a dog, but we don’t have pipes, either. There’s no good way to connect one Web application to another. Therefore, everything tends to be monolithic; and in a world of monolithic apps, everyone wants to build their own garden, inevitably with all the features that are in all the other gardens.
] What’s wrong with this picture? Why can’t I pipe an email message into an unrelated videoconferencing app? Sharing Google docs works wonderfully: why can’t I just pipe my Evernote note into Gdocs and have done with it? Evernote might think they’re losing out on this deal, but it’s the reverse.
] We have Web services with APIs; why can’t we use them? IFTTT is headed in the right direction, though it doesn’t quite get me to where I want to be. IFTTT’s biggest weakness is that it requires too much forethought and ceremony. With the Unix command line, you can just say “well, I can grep this, pipe the result into sed, and use wc to tally up the results.” Unix is great for one-time applications that you’ll never use again.
] The first person to create a tool that can pipe a table from a browser into a spreadsheet, a Google doc, or even a text file without massive pain will be my hero.
] I don’t want anyone’s walled garden. I’ve seen what’s inside the walls, and it isn’t a palace; it’s a tenement. I don’t want barely distinguishable tools that are mediocre at everything. I want tools that do one thing, and do it well. And that can be connected to each other to build powerful tools.

[HOW-TO]

]

[REFERENCE]

] SRC = HN, comments

comment mine

evanplaice

So... What you're saying is, you've never heard of Slack, Zapier, HubBot, etc.

The web developer world already has it's own form of pipes. It's they're called REST APIs.

It's not like O'Reilly Radar created Disqus comments. In fact, you probably use dozens of online services every day and don't even realize it.

Unix pipes are a prime example of a 'worse is better' philosophy that old school devs still cling to for dear life.

Pipes are the 'basic b****' of APIs. A 'modern' API passes structured data, can support authorization/authentication, can adapt to different circumstances/environments, is platform independent, etc...

Pipes are a platform specific tool whose implementation is dependent on the OS-level CLI specifications, the practical definition of a walled garden.

Details Photos Edit more