Imaginearium

When working with some files for our paper, I needed to extract some input data from an archive, not all as there's many of them, convert them, and then run it all through some pipelines. There's different tools such as Nix or Snakemake which allow you to systematically work with isolated pipelines.

A few let's say statements about system design decisions followed by ponderings. Efficiency is actively sidelined.

Computers are built on top of abstractions, I would perhaps even be willing to say that it is one of the few things in life that are pure abstractions all the way down. And while languages are excellent at that, some parts of the current computer systems are rather more lacking.

If I were to tell you that I want a trivial program, that takes two numbers and adds them, how much work is that gonna be?