Your complaints are, IMO, orthogonal to the UNIX philosophy (which, IMO, is also pretty orthogonal to the rule of science; now I have upset both sides :) ). UN

Your complaints are, IMO, orthogonal to the UNIX philosophy (which, IMO, is also pretty orthogonal to the rule of science; now I have upset both sides :) ). UNIX philosophy is, as written in the article, is based on programs that do one thing well and work with other programs. The second part, "work with other programs" is the one that encourages (but not requires) simple, text based I/O. If A, B and C write programs and independently design some custom, structured, binary I/O the chance of them being compatible is nil. If they output text, the UNIX glue of pipes and text conversions makes them cooperate quickly and efficiently. Not elegant? Sure. But working well in no time.