The usability, robustness and the ease of composition of simple text interfaces is not accidental. Pipes survived for many years for a reason (though they are b

The usability, robustness and the ease of composition of simple text interfaces is not accidental. Pipes survived for many years for a reason (though they are broken on Windows -- it is hard to pipe data as is without corrupting it). SOAP, WSDL have taught us already that more "structure" does not mean better. Binary interfaces such as provided by systemd or http/2 may teach us again the importance of simplicity, human-readability and avoiding too frigid constraints failing in the face of natural evolution between different software versions.