GoKawiilPipes, Forks, and Zombies
Pipe History
The idea of pipes
Doug Mcllroy, described the concept of pipes long before they were implemented.
Summary--what's most important. To put my strongest concerns into a nutshell: 1. We should have some ways of coupling programs like garden hose--screw in another segment when it becomes when it becomes necessary to massage data in another way. This is the way of IO also. 2. Our loader should be able to do link-loading and controlled establishment. 3. Our library filing scheme should allow for rather general indexing, responsibility, generations, data path switching. 4. It should be possible to get private system components (all routines are system components) for buggering around with. M. D. McIlroy October 11, 1964
Literative Programming
Don Knuth is the person who came up with the term computer science . He wrote The Art of Computer Programming and created the Latex language. Knuth enjoyed writing and programming so much that he developed Literative Programming . Knuth created a style of programming that allows you to write text about a program as you write code. The idea is to write prose and programs simultaneously. However, this idea did not take off because there was a large amount of overhead associated with completing simple tasks like text parsing. From a systems programming perspective using pipes, Mcllroy responded to Knuth's work. He was able to complete the same text parsing task in 6 lines of shell code using pipes. While Knuth approached the problem from an algorithms perspective, Mcllroy approached the problem from a systems perspective, chaining intermediate outputs together to arrive at the answer.
Pipes matter!
Mcllroy Knuth
The Less Program
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