Unix philosophy says a program should do only one thing and
do it well. Solve problems by sewing together a sequence of
small, specialized programs. Doug McIlroy summarized the Unix philosophy
as follows.
This is the Unix philosophy: Write
programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work
together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a
universal interface.
This design philosophy is closely related to “orthogonality.”
Programs should have independent features just as perpendicular
(orthogonal) lines run in independent directions.
In practice, programs gain overlapping features over time.
A set of programs may start out orthogonal but lose their uniqueness as
they evolve. I used to think that the departure from orthogonality was
due to a loss of vision or a loss of discipline, but now I have a more
charitable explanation.
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