A Life Decision

18 Jul 2000

I’ve decided to attempt to take the tenets of the UNIX design philosophy and apply them to my own life. Not necessarily in my programming, but in my life in general. I’ll let you know how it goes.

The Nine Major Tenets:

• small is beautiful
• make each program do one thing well
• build a prototype as soon as possible
• choose portability over efficiency
• store numerical data in flat files
• use software leverage to your advantage
• use shell scripts to increase leverage and portability
• avoid captive user interfaces
• make every program a filter

The Ten Lesser Tenets

• allow the user to tailor the environment
• make operating system kernels small and lightweight
• use lower case and keep it short
• save trees
• silence is golden
• think parallel
• the sum of the parts is greater than the whole
• look for the ninety percent solution
• worse is better
• think hierarchically