I've seen that interview before and that quote in particular resonates with me but at the same time there are basic economics to consider. I want to be clear,

I've seen that interview before and that quote in particular resonates with me but at the same time there are basic economics to consider. I want to be clear, what I meant by 'quality' above is functioning systems. If there's a hodge-podge solution that gives you a 10x improvement at the cost of 1/2x the productivity vs. an "elegant" framework that gives you a 2x improvement at 1/10x the productivity by requiring to re-invent all the tools, the 'hodge-podge' solution wins. To me, this is the same basic argument of Dvorak vs qwerty keyboards. Dvorak might be a 1-2x improvement over qwerty but qwerty wins because of cultural momentum. The improvement isn't worth uprooting the infrastructure already in place. I think programming languages suffer the same fate, where the size of code base, libraries, etc. secures it as the lingua franca even if there are other languages that are marginally better. As a rule of thumb, I think a replacement needs to be at 10x the improvement before it has a chance of uprooting entrenched systems. The Unix system might be chaotic but it's had a lot of time to adapt to different needs. There's also a culture of freedom, sharing and experimentation that isn't present in the Windows world. These all have real world implications on what tools are available for experimentation, use and improvement. > If you got sat down and told to come up with a set of composable command-line tools for a shell, the end result would have nothing at all in common with the bash/GNU tools. There is nothing there worth repeating. Sorry, no. This sounds like an emotional plea rather than anything rooted in critical thinking. Sorting text files isn't worth repeating? Searching text files isn't worth repeating? Piping text from one process to another isn't worth repeating? I've tried to be even keeled in my responses but this is ridiculous.