In Chapter8 we examined domain-specific minilanguages as a means of pushing program specification up a level, gaining flexibility, and minimizing bugs. These virtues make the language-based CLI an important style of Unix interface — one exemplified by the Unix shell itself.

The strengths of this pattern are well illustrated by the case study earlier in the chapter comparing dc(1)/bc(1) with xcalc(1). The advantages that we observed earlier (the gain in expressiveness and scriptability) are typical of minilanguages; they generalize to other situations in which you routinely have to sequence complex operations in a specialized problem domain. Often, unlike the calculator case, minilanguages also have a clear advantage in concision.

One of the most potent Unix design patterns is the combination of a GUI front end with a CLI minilanguage back end. Well-designed examples of this type are necessarily rather complex, but often a great deal simpler and more flexible than the amount of ad-hoc code that would be necessary to cover even a fraction of what the minilanguage can do.

This general pattern is not, of course, unique to Unix. Modern database suites everywhere normally consist of one or more GUI front ends and report generators, all of which talk to a common back-end using a query language such as SQL. But this pattern mainly evolved under Unix and is still much better understood and more widely applied there than elsewhere.

When the front and back ends of a system fulfilling this design pattern are combined in a single program, that program is often said to have an ‘embedded scripting language’. In the Unix world, Emacs is one of the best-known exemplars of this pattern; refer to our discussion of it in Chapter8 for some advantages.

The script-fu facility of GIMP is another good example. GIMP is a powerful open-source graphics editor. It has a GUI resembling that of Adobe Photoshop. Script-fu allows GIMP to be scripted using Scheme (a dialect of Lisp); scripting through Tcl, or Perl or Python is also available. Programs written in any of these languages can call GIMP internals through its plugin interface. The demonstration application for this facility is a Web page^[110] which allows people to construct simple logos and graphic buttons through a CGI interface that passes a generated Scheme program to an instance of GIMP, and returns a finished image.