The Art of Unix Programming - Eric S. Raymond

Date: 2022-04-20
| Rule of Modularity: Write simple parts connected by clean interfaces.
| As Brian Kernighan once observed, “Controlling complexity is the
| essence of computer programming” [Kernighan-Plauger]. Debugging
| dominates development time, and getting a working system out the
| door is usually less a result of brilliant design than it is of
| managing not to trip over your own feet too many times.  Assemblers,
| compilers, flowcharting, procedural programming, structured
| programming, “artificial intelligence”, fourth-generation
| languages, object orientation, and software-development
| methodologies without number have been touted and sold as a cure
| for this problem. All have failed as cures, if only because they
| ‘succeeded’ by escalating the normal level of program complexity
| to the point where (once again) human brains could barely cope. As
| Fred Brooks famously observed [Brooks], there is no silver bullet.
| The only way to write complex software that won't fall on its face
| is to hold its global complexity down — to build it out of simple
| parts connected by well-defined interfaces, so that most problems
| are local and you can have some hope of upgrading a part without
| breaking the whole
Chapter: Basics of the Unix Philosophy


Date: 2022-04-20
| Because maintenance is so important and so expensive, write programs
| as if the most important communication they do is not to the computer
| that executes them but to the human beings who will read and maintain
| the source code in the future (including yourself
Chapter: Basics of the Unix Philosophy


Date: 2022-04-20
| Unix tradition strongly encourages writing programs that read
| and write simple, textual, stream-oriented, device-independent
| formats. Under classic Unix, as many programs as possible are
| written as simple filters, which take a simple text stream on input
| and process
Chapter: Basics of the Unix Philosophy