It's funny. Unix was also meant as an IDE (persistency, logic, machine and user interfaces). It seems they all were trying to reach the same goal in their own way.
it's a different user interface paradigm, mainly it's not graphically sophisticated (independent streams of text vs dynamic bitmap overlays)and less time integrated (you have to define how and which script to run when something change). But at the time it was thought so, that's how I felt reading bits of this book http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix_Programming_Environmen....
The fact that dc was originally intended as basically the Unix system's bignums library http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch08s02.html#id2... helped to open my eyes to this. I think you could talk about this idea of Unix as "big Unix" and the narrower understanding of Unix programming, dominated by the C APIs, as "little Unix".
Little Unix took over the world, while big Unix collapsed under its own weight due to things like portability/versioning hell, robustness problems due to faulty tools and text-parsing errors, performance issues and so on. (Partly this was a success catastrophe, of course, for example in how the popularity of Unix resulted in a profusion of different Unix userlands with varying interfaces and bugs.) Also little Unix was more comprehensible from, and more portable to and from, the world of PC (MS-DOS/Windows/Mac) application development, where the environment is more or less the kernel's/OS vendor's APIs. The fact that clearly many more people have bought or read K&R http://www.amazon.com/dp/0131103628/ (with its very little-Unix perspective) than /The Unix Programming Environment/ http://www.amazon.com/dp/013937681X reflects this divergence, and also surely helped to create it.
It's funny. Unix was also meant as an IDE (persistency, logic, machine and user interfaces). It seems they all were trying to reach the same goal in their own way.
I never saw UNIX as an IDE, given its command line interface with ed and vi as editors.
it's a different user interface paradigm, mainly it's not graphically sophisticated (independent streams of text vs dynamic bitmap overlays)and less time integrated (you have to define how and which script to run when something change). But at the time it was thought so, that's how I felt reading bits of this book http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix_Programming_Environmen....
My first UNIX experience was in 1993 with Xenix, followed by almost all commercial variants of it.
By then I was already spoiled with GUI environments from Atari ST, Amiga 500, Windows 3.x and GEM, as well as the typical MS-DOS IDEs from Borland.
So I never saw UNIX that way.
UNIX is my IDE. perl5 is my VM. CPAN is my language.
ref: http://shadow.cat/blog/matt-s-trout/but-i-cant-use-cpan/ | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=968757
NB. Though I think someone else earlier (Audrey Tang perhaps?) made a similar quote (something like CPAN is my syntax?)
The fact that dc was originally intended as basically the Unix system's bignums library http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch08s02.html#id2... helped to open my eyes to this. I think you could talk about this idea of Unix as "big Unix" and the narrower understanding of Unix programming, dominated by the C APIs, as "little Unix".
Little Unix took over the world, while big Unix collapsed under its own weight due to things like portability/versioning hell, robustness problems due to faulty tools and text-parsing errors, performance issues and so on. (Partly this was a success catastrophe, of course, for example in how the popularity of Unix resulted in a profusion of different Unix userlands with varying interfaces and bugs.) Also little Unix was more comprehensible from, and more portable to and from, the world of PC (MS-DOS/Windows/Mac) application development, where the environment is more or less the kernel's/OS vendor's APIs. The fact that clearly many more people have bought or read K&R http://www.amazon.com/dp/0131103628/ (with its very little-Unix perspective) than /The Unix Programming Environment/ http://www.amazon.com/dp/013937681X reflects this divergence, and also surely helped to create it.