OK, I'll bite. :-) In particular, dynamic linking is suggested by many as being a bad thing, for example... https://www.google.com/search?q=dynamic+linking+is

OK, I'll bite. :-) In particular, dynamic linking is suggested by many as being a bad thing, for example... https://www.google.com/search?q=dynamic+linking+is+bad https://www.google.com/search?q=dynamic+linking+is+bad http://users.eecs.northwestern.edu/~kch479/docs/khale_rtld_2-7-2013.pdf http://users.eecs.northwestern.edu/~kch479/docs/khale_rtld_2... http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/dynamic-linking/ http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/dynamic-linking/ In general, as Alan Kay said in his 1997 OOPSLA talk [1] (which was not about Unix, but Smalltalk) "Think of how you can obsolete the damn thing". The Unix wars of the 1990s led (perhaps ironically) to Unix becoming and remaining a local maxima, and not obsoleted by something radically new and different, and better [2] in some dimension. This is perhaps a "meta-answer" to your question. You may wish to study the features of both DEC OpenVMS (released in 1977, a few years after Unix's initial release in 1969) and "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" [3] (released in 1992) for some contrasting approaches. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY [2] the word "better" only suggests one dimension of analysis or measurement [3] yes, that's its full name