Thanks for the link! I didn&#x27;t know that was the context for that famous quote, and it was a nice read. It seems that we so seldom get to experience that kind of perfection in software, which is always tangled up and half nonsense. It really is a wonder that anything works.<p>To me, the ideal of &quot;abstraction&quot; in software has to do with this search for unity, on a conceptual level. Unix with its files and processes seems to come pretty close to being this kind of dependable, understandable, cohesive abstraction... which is why I love shell scripting so much. Sure, it&#x27;s not the most beautiful language, but the basic building blocks make sense in some almost timeless way.<p>Digressing further, I&#x27;d really love to work on a cleaner shell language. Like, Perl is an exploration of what happens if you write your scripts in a souped-up awk, but what I really want is a bash for us new kids, with good support for nested data structures, functional patterns, some more clever ways of representing background processes and FIFOs, modules and packages, etc etc.<p>I forget how I got from Heidegger to FIFOs, but yeah, a ready-to-hand shell that works well with common tasks like serving HTTP and building JSON and stuff. I love the Unix philosophy but people aren&#x27;t really learning shell these days... something like it seems like a way forward... composing simple programs... ah!