Just yesterday I was opining in the IRC about what it would be like to have a operating system that was build from the ground up that supports smarter data formats than just text.
The concept of everything as a file, has awesome benefits I believe, but that doesn't meant files need to be unstructured text.
There's a core problem, that with text languages (like AWK or structured regex (sed, etc) you end up both having to parse AND manipulate data. which is no fun and prone to errors.
Abstracting away all of that into codecs that all of coreutils could speak would be very cool to me.
The second issue is structured data vs unstructured text. CSVs, or other table based formats make sense sometimes, and sometimes you want to be able to query things more easily. JSON provides that. What's the synthesis of both I don't know... but maybe this is closer to heaven.
I'd like to _minimize_ the amount of parsing or text manipulation done in any program and be able to focus on extracting and inserting the data I need, like a rosetta stone that just handles everything for me while I work. I want to be able to do:
awk "{print $schoolName}" or awk "{print $4}" and it just works - json, text, CSV.
The concept of everything as a file, has awesome benefits I believe, but that doesn't meant files need to be unstructured text.
There's a core problem, that with text languages (like AWK or structured regex (sed, etc) you end up both having to parse AND manipulate data. which is no fun and prone to errors.
Abstracting away all of that into codecs that all of coreutils could speak would be very cool to me.
The second issue is structured data vs unstructured text. CSVs, or other table based formats make sense sometimes, and sometimes you want to be able to query things more easily. JSON provides that. What's the synthesis of both I don't know... but maybe this is closer to heaven.
I'd like to _minimize_ the amount of parsing or text manipulation done in any program and be able to focus on extracting and inserting the data I need, like a rosetta stone that just handles everything for me while I work. I want to be able to do:
awk "{print $schoolName}" or awk "{print $4}" and it just works - json, text, CSV.