I think this is a very valid point and I've only heard it said once before in an HN discussion about the merits of Powershell. The idea of "do one thing and do

I think this is a very valid point and I've only heard it said once before in an HN discussion about the merits of Powershell. The idea of "do one thing and do it well" requires that things can communicate relatively easily, which is certainly not always the case, especially with more complex data. I think Powershell deals with this by allowing for (IIRC XML-encoded) intermediate representations of data to be passed through pipelines.