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The Art of Unix Programming
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Unix Programming - Chapter4.Modularity

There are two ways of constructing a software design. One is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies; the other is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.

-- C. A. R. Hoare The Emperor's Old Clothes, CACM February 1981

There is a natural hierarchy of code-partitioning methods that has evolved as programmers have had to manage ever-increasing levels of complexity. In the beginning, everything was one big lump of machine code. The earliest procedural languages brought in the notion of partition by subroutine. Then we invented service libraries to share common utility functions among multiple programs. Next, we invented separated address spaces and communicating processes. Today we routinely distribute program systems across multiple hosts separated by thousands of miles of network cable.

The early developers of Unix were among the pioneers in software modularity. Before them, the Rule of Modularity was computer-science theory but not engineering practice. In Design Rules [Baldwin-Clark], a path-breaking study of the economics of modularity in engineering design, the authors use the development of the computer industry as a case study and argue that the Unix community was in fact the first to systematically apply modular decomposition to production software, as opposed to hardware. Modularity of hardware has of course been one of the foundations of engineering since the adoption of standard screw threads in the late 1800s.

The Rule of Modularity bears amplification here: The only way to write complex software that won't fall on its face is to build it out of simple modules connected by well-defined interfaces, so that most problems are local and you can have some hope of fixing or optimizing a part without breaking the whole.

The tradition of being careful about modularity and of paying close attention to issues like orthogonality and compactness are still much deeper in the bone among Unix programmers than elsewhere.

Early Unix programmers became good at modularity because they had to be. An OS is one of the most complicated pieces of code around. If it is not well structured, it will fall apart. There were a couple of early failures at building Unix that were scrapped. One can blame the early (structureless) C for this, but basically it was because the OS was too complicated to write. We needed both refinements in tools (like C structures) and good practice in using them (like Rob Pike's rules for programming) before we could tame that complexity.

-- Ken Thompson

Early Unix hackers struggled with this in many ways. In the languages of 1970 function calls were expensive, either because call semantics were complicated (PL/1. Algol) or because the compiler was optimizing for other things like fast inner loops at the expense of call time. Thus, code tended to be written in big lumps. Ken and several of the other early Unix developers knew modularity was a good idea, but they remembered PL/1 and were reluctant to write small functions lest performance go to hell.

Dennis Ritchie encouraged modularity by telling all and sundry that function calls were really, really cheap in C. Everybody started writing small functions and modularizing. Years later we found out that function calls were still expensive on the PDP-11, and VAX code was often spending 50% of its time in the CALLS instruction. Dennis had lied to us! But it was too late; we were all hooked...

-- Steve Johnson

All programmers today, Unix natives or not, are taught to modularize at the subroutine level within programs. Some learn the art of doing this at the module or abstract-data-type level and call that ‘good design’. The design-patterns movement is making a noble effort to push up a level from there and discover successful design abstractions that can be applied to organize the large-scale structure of programs.

Getting better at all these kinds of problem partitioning is a worthy goal, and many excellent treatments of them are available elsewhere. We shall not attempt to cover all the issues relating to modularity within programs in too much detail: first, because that is a subject for an entire volume (or several volumes) in itself; and second, because this is a book about the art of Unix programming.

What we will do here is examine more specifically what the Unix tradition teaches us about how to follow the Rule of Modularity. In this chapter, our examples will live within process units. Later, in Chapter7, we'll examine the circumstances under which partitioning programs into multiple cooperating processes is a good idea, and discuss more specific techniques for doing that partitioning.


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The Art of Unix Programming
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