On boring tools

The most reliable tools on my laptop are also the least exciting. grep has not surprised me in fifteen years. rsync moved a hundred gigabytes last night without my noticing. cron, which I am told is unfashionable, has not skipped a job since I learned to type the asterisks in the right order.

There is a category of software whose value is precisely that it has stopped changing. You learn the shape of it once and then you spend the rest of your career being quietly grateful. The flags do what they did. The output format is the same. The man page is the same man page your predecessor read, and your successor will read, and nothing has been deprecated in the meantime.

I think about this a lot when I look at the trajectory of the various tools that promised to replace these. They were, for a while, more pleasant to use. Then they got funded. Then they got a config format. Then they got a successor. The boring tools are still here.

This is not a sermon about old age. It is closer to a small piece of advice I would give myself ten years ago: when picking the tool for the job, weigh how long it has stayed boring. The Unix utilities are not boring because they are old. They are boring because someone, decades ago, got the shape right, and the rest of us have been lucky enough to inherit it.