Subject:
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Unix geeks
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.publish
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Date:
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Wed, 17 Feb 1999 19:40:12 GMT
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Viewed:
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2092 times
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Steve:
> Mike:
> > Steve:
> > > Computers should serve people, not the other way around.
> >
> > Amen. But if that really happened then Unix geeks wouldn't be able to
> > walk around thinking they're better than everyone else because they
> > know how to do things the hard way while looking down on people who
> > get the job done doing them the easy way.
I think it's a matter of perspective... When someone who is a Unix geek is
doing something the hard way, In my experience they're actually doing it the
easy way -- it just looks cryptic if you don't speak the lingo. They're often
also inventing (on-the-fly) a repeatable procedure which would be 100x more
complicated in most other environments. For example, if you wanted to see a
list of the most common three-letter beginnings of English words, you could
click an icon on your desktop which launches a program someone wrote for this
(as if it would exist), or you could just go to a shell and rattle off:
cat /etc/words | awk '{print substr($0,1,3)}' | sort | uniq -c | sort
It looks silly, but a lot of it is idiomatic and second-nature. If you wanted
to see only the least frequently occurring ones, you could type
cat /etc/words | awk '{print substr($0,1,3)}' | sort | uniq -c | sort | head
and if you wanted to see only the most frequently occurring ones, you could
type
cat /etc/words | awk '{print substr($0,1,3)}' | sort | uniq -c | sort | tail
I think most of time when Unix geeks are "looking down" on something, it's the
programming environment and the inability of other environment to provide quick
& simple one-off solutions to various problems. The line above only takes
about 30 seconds to think up & type, whereas writing an actual program to do
that would take at least 5 minutes (and more without a string hash library).
> Hmm. Since you put it that way, Unix is serving people. But only some
> people, and not in the way I intended.
I'll bet you'll be running within 3 years. And you'll like it. ;-)
--Todd
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Unix geeks
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| (...) Does uniq mess up the sorting? I don't see why you have to pipe it through sort twice otherwise. I mean, Yick. sort is a slow program anyway, so doing it twice where once would do :) Jasper (26 years ago, 18-Feb-99, to lugnet.publish)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Lego Easter Eggs!
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| (...) Hmm. Since you put it that way, Unix is serving people. But only some people, and not in the way I intended. Steve (26 years ago, 17-Feb-99, to lugnet.publish)
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