> In the talk, he gives several demonstrations a key aspect of why unix pipelines are so practically useful: you build them interactively.
The standard Unix interface might have been interactive in the ’70s, back when hardware and peripherals were horribly non-interactive. But I don’t know why so many so-called millenial programmers (people my age) get excited about the alleged interactivity of the Unix that most people are familiar with. It doesn’t even have the cutting edge ’90s interactivity of Plan 9, what with mouse(!) selection of arbitrary text that can be piped to commands and so on. And every time someone comes up with a Unix-hosted tool that uses some kind of fold-up menu that informs you about what key combination you can type next (you know, like what all GUI programs have with Alt+x and the file|edit|view|… toolbar), people hail it as some kind of UX innovation.
The standard Unix interface might have been interactive in the ’70s, back when hardware and peripherals were horribly non-interactive. But I don’t know why so many so-called millenial programmers (people my age) get excited about the alleged interactivity of the Unix that most people are familiar with. It doesn’t even have the cutting edge ’90s interactivity of Plan 9, what with mouse(!) selection of arbitrary text that can be piped to commands and so on. And every time someone comes up with a Unix-hosted tool that uses some kind of fold-up menu that informs you about what key combination you can type next (you know, like what all GUI programs have with Alt+x and the file|edit|view|… toolbar), people hail it as some kind of UX innovation.