I think the UNIX philosophy goes a long way here. FP is also close to this. But it's not so simple... har har har. Certain UNIX tools are fairly stick-like in

I think the UNIX philosophy goes a long way here. FP is also close to this. But it's not so simple... har har har. Certain UNIX tools are fairly stick-like in their basic usage. Things like cat, grep, sed, sort, cut, paste, tee, less... they are all at least immediately useful with a basic command even if they have huge sets of options. The UNIX grep vs. Windows Grep (see http://www.wingrep.com/resources/images/mainwindow1.png http://www.wingrep.com/resources/images/mainwindow1.png) is a great illustration, because the basic use case of grep is as simple as possible (`grep foo' for instance, operating on stdin). With the complex Windows Grep you get the whole UI (and more, with things like wizards and prompts) all the time, no matter what you need. You could never learn anything more about UNIX grep than `grep foo' and it would never get in your way, but with Windows Grep and other complex apps you get everything all of the time. But, in the end, UNIX grep and Windows Grep can both basically do the same things.