Unix, Awk, Perl, and Scsh

I’m going to be expand­ing on something I’ve talked about before. This idea of Unix’s sup­posed sim­plic­ity and how Unix has devi­ated over the years rather fas­ci­nates me.

Some years ago I remem­ber read­ing the The Art of Unix Programming by the vocif­er­ous Eric Ray­mond. I remem­ber this book mak­ing a strong impact on how a I thought about sys­tem design and the writ­ing of new pro­grams. TAoUP is not, by itself, a rev­o­lu­tion­ary book. Rather, it is a col­lec­tion of received wis­dom regard­ing the design of the Unix oper­at­ing sys­tem and of pro­grams intended to be run in the Unix envi­ron­ment. I think that the most impor­tant idea put for­ward in the book is the notion of Unix, rather than sim­ply being a plat­form on which to run large com­pli­cated pro­grams, is rather a col­lec­tion of smaller pro­grams, uni­fied by a few metaphors.… Read More

Om and Reagent

I’ve been play­ing, of late, with Clo­jure­Script fron­t-ends, specif­i­cally with Om and with Reagent. Between the two, I like Reagent much bet­ter. The short rea­son why is that it feels much more ‘Clo­jur­ish’ and the pro­gram­ming model feels much more acces­si­ble, espe­cially to some­one already famil­iar with Clo­jure/­Clo­jure­Script. Om, by con­trast, feels like a thin­ner wrap­per over React And even though it does a num­ber of neat things, it’s ulti­mately more unwieldy. (I haven’t tried the other Clo­jure­Script React wrap­per, Quiescent. It looks promis­ing, leav­ing the ques­tion of state man­age­ment to devel­oper entire­ly, unlike either Reagent or Om. I’ll have to take a real look at it sometime.)

Both of these frame­works are basi­cally wrap­pers for Reactjs which is one of the more unique Javascript front end frame­works out there. The quick low-­down on React is that it is a tool for gen­er­at­ing a UI (ba­si­cal­ly, your HTML DOM), from appli­ca­tion data. Instead of attempt­ing to mutate a sta­tic DOM in-­place, React effec­tively regen­er­ates the DOM from scratch with every update to the appli­ca­tion data. React has a num­ber of tricks to make this per­for­mant, significantly: cre­at­ing a stripped down vir­tual DOM which the appli­ca­tion code oper­ates on instead of the browser’s actual DOM. Oper­at­ing on the VDOM is quicker than oper­at­ing on the browser’s native DOM and it can be diffed with older ver­sions to allow React to selec­tively update the browser’s DOM. The end result is that using React involves defin­ing a lot of objects called ‘com­po­nents’ which gen­er­ate HTML from plain Javascript data. This means you can sep­a­rate your appli­ca­tion log­ic, which gen­er­ates and oper­ates on the appli­ca­tion state from your UI layer which is merely passed the appli­ca­tion state (or a part of it.) This makes it rather func­tional in con­cep­tion, mak­ing it a good match for Clo­jure­Script, which is strictly func­tion­al… Read More

Why systemd is taking over

Sys­temd has been the con­tro­ver­sial hot-but­ton topic for the Linux com­mu­nity for the past few years. Sys­temd replaces the tra­di­tional Sys­tem V init sys­tem and basi­cally just redoes the whole core of the oper­at­ing sys­tem. It takes over the init sys­tem, the log­ging sys­tem, and all of the auto­matic launch­ers for X, and just crams them into this sin­gle mono­lithic sys­tem. Sys­temd changes everything and for what? Aside from faster boot times, What does sys­temd give us that we did­n’t have before and why are all the dis­tros adopt­ing it? I’ll tell you why… Read More