The Art of UNIX Programming
by Eric S. Raymond · 22 Sep 2003 · 612pp · 187,431 words
editors but Web browsers, mail and newsgroup readers, and other communications programs. All tend to evolve in accordance with the Law of Software Envelopment, aka Zawinski's Law: “Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can”. Jamie Zawinski, inventor
…
success of large, integrated application suites outside the Unix world tends to confirm this, and directly challenges the Unix philosophy of minimalism. To the extent Zawinski's Law is correct, it suggests that some things want to be small and some want to be large, but the middle ground is unstable. The superficial
…
applications and program systems. It is, however, all too easy to get sloppy about how large your shared context needs to be. The pressure behind Zawinski's Law is the tendency of applications to want to share context for convenience. It's easy to end up carrying around too much weight, too many