On Thursday 24 September 2009, jonr@destar.net said something like:
> But because wget's options weren't the same on both of those systems
> we could write an application that is not on all *nix systems and use
> that instead?
>
> Or maybe just code for the slight variations of some implementations
> of wget and ifconfig on different systems.
Rather than make every programmer know the variations of every system,
why not have a few experts who know this and can make a good,
abstracted API? Similiarly: Why have Qt? Why doesn't every programmer
learn the variations across all operating systems to code their
application and its windowing interface?
The goal of abstraction is to make programming easier, and let others
worry about the nitty-gritty details. Notice I said "goal," it doesn't
always work out that way.
[I doubt spawning a system call and grepping ifconfig is really the best
way to check the state of a network interface. I'm sure what Network
Manager abstracts is querying the OS's networking APIs.
j
-- Joshua Kugler Part-Time System Admin/Programmer http://www.eeinternet.com PGP Key: http://pgp.mit.edu/ ID 0x14EA086E --------- To unsubscribe, send email to <aklug-request@aklug.org> with 'unsubscribe' in the message body.Received on Thu Sep 24 15:53:53 2009
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