Re: Adding a 'D - date' option in 'cat'

At 12:23 PM -0400 9/7/06, Bill Vermillion wrote:
>
>I don't see that.  But then again I moved to Unix in 1983 - and got
>away from all the bloat and crap that others but in their OSes.

Except that Perl is still the recommended way to add a timestamp
to lines in a file.  An extremely simple task, which can only be
done with a massive program.  I have a mosquito to swat, and
people are pulling out a sledge hammer.  "Well, if you know what
you're doing, then you can REALLY swat a mosquito with this baby!".

>And my first contact with BSD type systems was in NeXTStep - which
>had a lot of BSD in it - and when running at a command line it was
>just like BSD for the most part.

I started as a systems programmer in 1979, and moved to NeXTSTEP as
my primary platform in 1990 or so.  Since then, I have also worked
on SunOS, AIX, IRIX, Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Redhat linux
(and my original NeXTstation is still running here in my office!).
But I will skip my full life history, because it is not relevant.

Let's just say I have plenty of experience with Unix, so I also
appreciate the philosophy of small utilities.  But I maintain that
perl is not a small utility.  If we, in *fact*, have to constantly
resort to perl to get a job done, then Unix itself is not getting
the job done.  Unix ends up as nothing more than a virtual-machine
environment which is used to launch those two other operating
systems, known as Emacs and Perl.

It isn't the unix philosophy per se that I object to.  It's that
some backers of the unix philosophy pretend that there are plenty
of small utilities to get things done, when in fact everyone ends
up learning perl, python or ruby to get even *trivial* tasks done.
I think we could reduce that with just a few more small utilities,
but the very same people who argue *for* small utilities, will
also argue that we should not add any new utilities.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn     =               drosehn_at_rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer               or   gad_at_FreeBSD.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute;             Troy, NY;  USA