[generalizations]

> If the software does any interactions with other software, think any kind of networking like email, ftp or whatever, think printing, and so on, then you should expect it to stop working (in those areas at least) at some point.

This is the beauty of line-delineated (ha) text-based pipes. I wonder if some of those unix tools would be considered in any sense 'finished'.

[nradov]

Text based pipes only work well for a very limited set of use cases. In the real world we often have to deal with binary data, objects, and structured documents.