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Discussion on: What's your favorite software idiom/aphorism?

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Hadrian Hughes

I like seeing this applied on the macro level too. ie keeping a command line tool specialised to doing one specific task very well.

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Yufan Lou • Edited

You'd be surprised at how god-damn much those command line tools actually do.

If you open up a manpage for ls on mac, you’ll see that it starts with

ls [-ABCFGHLOPRSTUW@abcdefghiklmnopqrstuwx1] [file ...]

That is, the one-letter flags to ls include every lowercase letter except for {jvyz}, 14 uppercase letters, plus @ and 1. That’s 22 + 14 + 2 = 38 single-character options alone.

-- The growth of command line options, 1979-Present

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Lorraine Lee

Also Google's rule for browser extensions, each extension should do one thing.