Month: July 2012

Most programming languages have facilities of some sort to enable the developer to execute commands on the OS’s shell prompt. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve never been able to have an easy time at managing system processes properly (i.e., representing processes individually through the language’s constructs). Representing multiple processes piped from one to the next properly seemed like a pipe dream (sorry). I think the first painless way of doing this, at least among all the different options that I’ve seen, is in Clojure with the clj-commons-exec project. At the moment, it seems like a hidden gem. A side benefit of the project is that the evolution of the code for piping one process to the next, at least for me, is instructive on the difference between object-oriented and functional paradigms.