Comment by jcgl

> love your blog, thanks for the link.

Thank you!

Configuring configuration via env var is a good historical example. I think that especially works nicely when you Buy An Operating System. You know, one that is created and provided by A Vendor. In principle, the vendor can architect a unified metaconfiguration system, e.g. one or several env vars that align behavior to a standard.

But I dunno if it would work so well to to hypothetically apply that tactic to a modern bazaar-based OS like Linux. Distros do amazing, valuable work to unify things, but modern Linux is basically a zillion software packages in a trench coat. So either the distro carries a zillion patches to have a few env vars, or the distro carries no patches and there are a zillion env vars. Either way, total cost of maintenance explodes.

Maybe when people say "text is the universal interface," they really mean that once you've released a textual interface, the interface becomes universal, unchanging for all time.