<story><title>Decoded: GNU Coreutils (2018)</title><url>https://maizure.org/projects/decoded-gnu-coreutils/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>1vuio0pswjnm7</author><text>&amp;quot;Many of these utilities are approaching 30 years old and include revisions by many people over the years.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;They are not designed for long life or to scale beyond their role.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Would love to see some examples from the author of programs he believes are &amp;quot;designed for long life&amp;quot; that have been around 30 years.&lt;p&gt;Or even ones he thinks will be around for 30 years.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>matheusmoreira</author><text>Well, what exactly is their role? Is there a limit to what we can do with these things?&lt;p&gt;To test a little programming language I made, I created a testing framework with bash and coreutils. I felt guilty about not using a &amp;quot;proper&amp;quot; language at first but it works so well. In parallel too.&lt;p&gt;I found that the the only thing I couldn&amp;#x27;t test was the argv[0] of the program. No matter how much I twisted the programs, I couldn&amp;#x27;t get them to do exactly what I wanted. So I sent a feature request and a patch to coreutils to give env this feature:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;lists.gnu.org&amp;#x2F;archive&amp;#x2F;html&amp;#x2F;coreutils&amp;#x2F;2023-08&amp;#x2F;msg00060.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;lists.gnu.org&amp;#x2F;archive&amp;#x2F;html&amp;#x2F;coreutils&amp;#x2F;2023-08&amp;#x2F;msg0006...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Looks like it&amp;#x27;s gonna make it in. A new feature for this old program.</text></comment>
<story><title>Decoded: GNU Coreutils (2018)</title><url>https://maizure.org/projects/decoded-gnu-coreutils/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>1vuio0pswjnm7</author><text>&amp;quot;Many of these utilities are approaching 30 years old and include revisions by many people over the years.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;They are not designed for long life or to scale beyond their role.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Would love to see some examples from the author of programs he believes are &amp;quot;designed for long life&amp;quot; that have been around 30 years.&lt;p&gt;Or even ones he thinks will be around for 30 years.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>remexre</author><text>I think that was meant to be understood in context as &amp;quot;meant to be actively developed&amp;quot; (as opposed to maintained) for a long time. The practices the author lists are ones that in larger programs would typically be criticized for damaging maintainability as the program grows.</text></comment>