| > It's so weird to me that "write programs that do one thing well" is constantly referred to as "The Unix Philosophy" [...] If anything can be said to be the actual lived Unix philosophy it's probably something like: 1) Try to make your programs communicate using text, where the 'record' is separated by a newline. [..etc..] The Unix Philosophy isn't just about writing programs that do one thing well (and FWIW it isn't really a philosophy or dogma, it is more of a guideline/goal), there are a bunch of things. The "write programs that do one thing well" is just one ways to think about it. The most common set of goals is: 1. Write programs that do one thing and do it well. 2. Write programs to work together. 3. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface. But there is really more to it as can be seen in the Wikipedia page[0], like ESR's 19 rules and Mike Gancarz (who wrote the "The UNIX Philosophy" book from his experiences) 9 tenets (three of the most common being using flat text files for data, avoiding captive user interfaces as that makes composition harder and making programs act as filters). Really at the very core is the goal to make programs that can be glued together with other programs (often via scripts) to perform tasks and communicate in ways (pretty always via text) that humans can see so that they can stitch them together even if they know nothing about each other (for example even if two or more programs they use different formats for their input/output, since they use text, other common tools like grep, awk, etc can be used as filters/pipes directly or via scripts to connect them together). This is where the "do one thing" comes from: if your program acts as a filter and/or communicates just via text, there is no need to complicate your program by adding functionality that another program can provide since a user can simply glue the two together. For example if you have some program that returns the values of some sensors you don't need to add search or filtering functionality since one can use grep and awk for that. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy |