The Rule of Silence (2006)
To play devil&#x27;s advocate, part of the reason things like The Rule of Silence are talked about is because of the messy unix philosophy of treating everything like plain text.<p>If structured data was embraced we would have developed appropriate tooling to interact with it in the way that we prefer.<p>This runs very deep in unix and a lot of people are too &quot;brainwashed&quot; to think of other ways. Instead they develop other exotic ways of dealing with the problem.<p>Oh you don&#x27;t like that output? Easy! pipe that crap into sed then awk then perl then cut then wc and you&#x27;re golden!<p>When you get tot that point you have to understand that you have chosen to ignore the fact that the data you are dealing with must be represented in something much closer to a relational database than lines of ASCII text.<p>Logging is another area you see the consequences of this. A log is not a line of text. Repeat after me a log entry is not a damn line of text.<p>&quot;Oh but isn&#x27;t it neat you can pipe it to grep?&quot; NO! No it&#x27;s not neat, maybe it was neat 20 years ago. Today I want that damn data in a structure. Then you can still print it out in one line and pipe it to grep all you want.<p>Another area that you see the unfortunate side effects of this philosophy is with the mess of file-based software configuration.<p>Yes I get it, you like your SSH session and Emacs&#x2F;Vim blah blah but that&#x27;s short-sighted.<p>I want my software configuration stored in a database not in a bunch of fragile files with made up syntax that are always one typo or syntax error away from being potentially silently ignored.<p>The fetish for easily-editable ASCII files and escaping from structure is holding us back. Structured data does not automatically imply hidden and inaccessible, that&#x27;s a matter of developing appropriate tooling.