[scrupulusalbion]

> The unix principle works quite well for stuff like grep/find/awk but there is just now way you could make GIMP follow the unix principle.

It seems that the unix principle is most relevant when compiling a C program takes too long and no interpreters exist that are fast enough. So, you figure out all the higher level functionality that you will need for system administration and compile that long before needing to do any sysadmin work. When a problem arises on a system, you can write a shell script that uses those already compiled commands, instead of writing a C program and waiting for it to compile. If your initial code sucks, you don't have to debug and recompile; you just debug and re-run the script.

Compiling C programs is now substantially less time consuming, so you could use C for sysadmin work (shudder). C shell was perhaps a similar attempt to get the benefits of C, but without the downside of compilation times. I seem to recall some essay on the harmfulness of using csh, so C will continue to keep its place.