The first of McIlroy’s dicta is often paraphrased as “do one thing and do it well”, which is shortened from “Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new ‘features.'”
McIlroy’s example of this dictum is:
Surprising to outsiders is the fact that UNIX compilers produce no listings: printing can be done better and more flexibly by a separate program.
If you open up a manpage for ls on mac, you’ll see that it starts with
ls [-ABCFGHLOPRSTUW@abcdefghiklmnopqrstuwx1] [file ...]
That is, the one-letter flags to ls include every lowercase letter except for {jvyz}, 14 uppercase letters, plus @ and 1. That’s 22 + 14 + 2 = 38 single-character options alone. (!!)
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
