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title: Integrated tools
date: 2014-11-27 21:30:21
format: md
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Continuing that thought, I feel that the tools we use are very much
disconnected from each other.  Of course that is the basic tennet, tools which
do one thing well.  However, tools serve a specific purpose, which in itself
can be characterised as providing a specific service.  It seems strange that
basically the only widely applicable way to connect very different tools is the
shell, respectively calling out to other programs.

I would argue that using some another paradigms could rather help to make the
interplay between services in this sense much easier.  For example, if we were
to use not only a message bus, line in Plan9, but also a shared blackboard-like
database to exchange messages in a common format, then having different daemons
react on state changes would be much easier.

Of course, this would already be possible if the one point, a common exchange
format, was satisfied.  In that case, using file system notifications together
with files, pipes, fifos etc. would probably be enough to have largely the same
system, but based on the file system abstraction.