Aliver's Blog

1. They are much safer than power tools. Cutting off your finger with a band saw or table saw is nearly instant. You finger will hit the floor before you realize what just happened. Also, you don’t need to constantly wear a dust mask to prevent yourself from getting some nasty disease when working with hand tools. Unix CLI tools give you more fined grained control and involvement. Thus, I’d argue they are safer in many cases than their GUI counterparts.
2. They don’t make much noise. I’m a night owl, but my neighbors are not. They wouldn’t appreciate the sound of a router at 3:00AM, but a router-plane? No, problem. Unix CLI tools have a smaller footprint on a system than their GUI cousins. Think of how much you can do at any time on a remote server via secure shell without being noticed for eating CPU time or showing up in a control panel somewhere and being badgered about it (ala VMware vCenter).
3. I get sick of technology. I get sick of servers (well, sometimes). I feel a connection with the past, knowing that people 300 years ago were doing the same thing. I want to actually make something that isn’t so ephemeral and was a labor of love. I’m not in a hurry and I don’t want to be rushed by a machine, a boss, or a deadline. Who cares if it takes longer. That’s not the reason why I’m doing it. The CLI tools also connect me with the masters like Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson. I like thinking that the useful thing I create for myself or others follows some well honed tradition.
4. I can fully understand the tool and it’s capabilities. I know what to expect from it and how to tweak it for my needs. A hand plane or saw only has a few parts. A modern table saw is pretty complicated and can break or misbehave in ways I won’t immediately be able to fix or perhaps grasp. The same is true for CLI versus GUI tools. I know how ‘tr’ or ‘sed’ works. However, your wiz-bang GUI-based Java tool might blow up and simply give me a dialog that says “I’m hosed” — “OK?” How do I address that or fix it?
5. Pride. Perhaps it’s just elitism, I don’t know. Deadly sin or not, I’m not sure I care. Any meathead can whip out a circular saw and an edge guide to make a straight cut. Can he do it with a backsaw ? Anyone can shove a board into a planer, but can they make a perfectly square workpiece with a jack plane, and tune that plane ? No, it’s not rocket science or magic, but hand tools take some investment of skill and finesse that can only come with practice. The same is true of CLI versus GUI tools. Sure, you can click your way through making a cluster with the XML-crap tool that ships out with LinuxHA 2.x nowadays, but will it stand up like a HP ServiceGuard cluster with hand-crafted resource scripts ?  My experience says, “no way”.
6. The results are one of a kind and truly intrinsically special. Do you think 50 years from now, Southerbys will want your fiberboard bookcase from Wal-Mart with peeling vinyl veneer? The art shows in a real labor of love. That’s why folks will want it that much more 100 or 200 years later. Machine made junk is still Chinese robot-made junk even if it doesn’t fall apart right away. Of course, in IT, this is a touchy one for the manager types out there. Everyone complains about something “custom” in IT. That means they can’t yank you out of your seat and replace you with someone cheaper at their whim. However, they don’t often consider what the real value of that expert’s work was.  They usually also don’t consider simply asking you to document your work to a degree that an expert with your same skill could follow it. The focus these days is on interoperability with an emphasis on less skilled folks. However, the truly phenomenal innovations still generally come from the wizards in a cave, not the thousand monkeys. Google, Linux, Facebook, C, and other big-deals-in-IT didn’t come from a sweatshop overseas and were generally framed in initially by one or two talented hardworking people.
7. I like total control over my work. I take pride in what I make. I don’t want it ruined by applying too much power too fast or flinging oil onto my $30 a board foot exotic woods and ruining the finish. With hand tools, the only one to blame for bad results is me.  The same is true with the CLI. I can use a minimal amount of resources on the system by hand-crafting solutions that do only what’s needed.
8. Hand tools ease my stress instead of causing it. Due to the noise and propensity to blow up in my face if there is a hidden nail in the board, I get nervous when I fire up a 2 1/2 horsepower router or 5 horse table saw. The same is true when I use GUI tools. When the hard drive is cranking away and the GUI is locked up to the point it won’t even repaint the window I start thinking “Great, am I going to lose all my work?” I have a more deterministic attitude when coding a script or running a CLI tool that’s been around for 35 years.
9. I have to exercise patience. It’s just good for my mental health to not be in an instant gratification mindset all the time.
10. I’m in good company. I’ve noticed a lot of guys love to brag about their power tools. They have a bazillion watt band saw or a drill press with a laser on it. Who cares? Your tools don’t make you more skilled or instantly give you the benefit of practice and experience. Sure, you have a router dovetail jig. Do you use it? Show me your work. Don’t tell me what kind of crazy tool collection you have. I’m not impressed. It reminds me of people who brag about all the pirated art software they have. You expect me to believe that because you pirated Maya, 3D-studio, and Photoshop that you are an artist? Does the fact that you just purchased a 10-jigahertz CPU make you able to code better or even faster than I can? I still use my 200Mhz SGI Indy sometimes just for the fun and nostalgia of it. The code I write on it still compiles on a supercomputer. I’ve found that I others who think this way tend to produce good work rather than simply buying fast tools.

~ by aliver on March 4, 2010.

Posted in Uncategorized
Tags: cli, unix, woodworking