Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I can't tell whether the UNIX people have lost their way, or just the demands of modern shell scripts cannot be met by typical shell philosophy - that is, piping together the output of small, orthogonal utilities.

The emergence and constantly increasing complexity of these small, bespoke DSLs like this or jq does not inspire confidence in me.



> demands of modern shell scripts cannot be met by typical shell philosophy

That. Pipes and unstructured binary data isn't compositional enough, making the divide between the kinds of things you can express in the language you use to write a stage in a pipeline and the kinds of things you can express by building a pipeline too large.


A single tool to parse JSON and pipe it? That's Unix too.


you made me think a possible corollary (?) question would be if the json people don't perfectly overlap with the unix people.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2026 batch! Applications are open till July 27.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: