The point of view of the article is very personal, but it is true that UNIX smells text, and I like this feeling when I'm using Emacs or vim, org making a script with awk, grep and the rest of the family.
I'm not a programmer at all, I use the computer to do science, and I feel quite comfortable with the UNIX toolbox. I don't know why, but it just sounds right, even though it might be quite arcane. Yesterday I did, quite fast, some nice figures using, basically, grep, awk and gnuplot, and a little bit of dc to do some calculations. But it is true that this figure could have been done with python, IDL or anything else.
The article point of view might not reflect reality, but I liked its love for words.
Yesterday I did, quite fast, some nice figures using, basically, grep, awk and gnuplot, and a little bit of dc to do some calculations. But it is true that this figure could have been done with python, IDL or anything else.
True that you could have done it with python, or IDL, or dozens of other tools, but I'd challenge you to do it with the built in stuff that comes with Windows or MacOS <= 9. Those programs you mentioned are environments specialized for doing things like making figures (among other things). I doubt K&R would've said one of the main objectives of *nix is to make a system that can easily create figures. Something that unifies all the things you mentioned is that they are inherently text-based, while the OSes I mentioned are inherently not.
If you're a polyglot, you'll notice that there are some things you like about some languages, and things you don't like. So you might prefer to express some kinds of thoughts in one language, and this is equivalent to using a different (text-based) environment. But when you get down to it, you are expressing the thought through the lens of a spoken/written language, each of which has its own literature. Pictures, on the other hand, are fundamentally different, and I'd be hesitant to call a sculpture a piece of literature (although it may well be an incredible work of art). I'd be curious to know how many people in the author's Unix shop were Art History majors.
Yes, I'm a polyglot (I work in English and French, I live in Catalan and Spanish and I have fun in Esperanto). And sometimes I have fun trying to say things that sound ok in one language in another one and the results are usually quite interesting :-). I love words and I love to live in text mode.
I'm not a programmer at all, I use the computer to do science, and I feel quite comfortable with the UNIX toolbox. I don't know why, but it just sounds right, even though it might be quite arcane. Yesterday I did, quite fast, some nice figures using, basically, grep, awk and gnuplot, and a little bit of dc to do some calculations. But it is true that this figure could have been done with python, IDL or anything else.
The article point of view might not reflect reality, but I liked its love for words.