Which technology will prove to be “Lindy” over centuries? Unix, “sed” and “grep” are from the 70s and remain popular. Will our descendants look back, as we do to the ruins of Pompeii and find serving spoons like those we use today, and say, “Ah, they used sed back then, too.”
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Another UNIX aphorism: “Worse is better.” Richard P. Gabriel, who coined the phrase, does better work here than “Less is more.” It’s provocative, but silly enough for people not to get carried away with it.
Doug McIlroy, in The UNIX Philosophy, “Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program.” reminds me of Edmund Burke, on society as a partnership “between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”