brainstorms

Thursday June 08, 2006

elements of style: unix as literature

just came across thomas scoville's 1998 piece elements of style: unix as literature through a friend's email.

The common thread was wordsmithing; a suspiciously high proportion of my UNIX colleagues had already developed, in some prior career, a comfort and fluency with text and printed words. They were adept readers and writers, and UNIX played handily to those strengths. UNIX was, in some sense, literature to them. Suddenly the overrepresentation of polyglots, liberal-arts types, and voracious readers in the UNIX community didn't seem so mysterious [...]

[musical selection: tbd]

random 10 [meme]

A Ballad	Stan Getz [The Artistry Of Stan Getz, The Best Of The Verve Years]
Logos Part One (B)	Tangerine Dream [Dream Sequence - The Best Of Tangerine Dream]
Just To Hold My Hand	Big Boy Myles [Creole Kings Of New Orleans]
Sitting On Top Of The World	Howlin' Wolf [Chess Blues 1954-1960]
Jeep's Blues	Duke Ellington [Ellington At Newport 1956]
Moustahil	Natacha Atlas [Halim]
Who You Fighting For?	UB40 [Who You Fighting For?]
La Chute	Yann Tiersen [Le Phare]
La mamma morta	Maria Callas [A Night at the Opera]
See Ruby Fall	Johnny Cash [The Essential Johnny Cash 1955-1983]