[barrkel]

The rich typing of most OO languages and frameworks means that the "defined interfaces" are usually many and varied, and the system is less composable and reconfigurable as a result.

Unix pipes work so well in part precisely because the medium of exchange is so unstructured, with every "module" speaking the same language. You may need to massage the medium between two modules, but guess what, we have other modules like cut and sed and awk, that are not only able to transform the medium so that modules can be attached to one another, but themselves only had to be written once.

I think the Unix pipe pattern of architecture works very well in the large, and you see things very close to it elsewhere. C#'s Linq is fundamentally based on transforming iterator streams - little different, architecturally, than Unix pipes. The Rack middleware stack in Rails has a similar structure - every module has a single method, and recurses into the next step in the pipeline, and gets a chance to modify input on the way in and output on the way out. Both get their power by using fundamentally the same "type" on all the boundaries between modules, rather than module-specific types. It's the very antithesis of a language like Java, which even wants you to wrap your exceptions in a module-specific type.