Why isn’t “top” better at adapting to a wide terminal window? Why can’t “locate” prune form its output the content of a matching directory. It’s like once these tools were created and deemed good enough, nobody has cared. But people use these and are frustrated with them every day. Most command-line programs aren’t very good as direct human interfaces, yet they aren’t good as building blocks for more complex tools either, like the UNIX creators originally intended to some degree. System administrators and lowly developers still have to use these tools all the time, why has nobody been able or willing to improve them by any significance?
Why do software developers, as a community, put up with so much crap: tools, techniques and metaphors that don’t work very well but have barely changed in over 30 years. I can hardly believe that all the world’s software is still built on dumb mono-spaced text files.
