See Rob Pike's talk from 2001, "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: the Unix Legacy" http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/good_bad_ugly/slides.pdf http://doc.cat-v.org/

See Rob Pike's talk from 2001, "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: the Unix Legacy" http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/good_bad_ugly/slides.pdf http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/good_bad_ugly/slides.pdf "What makes the system good at what it’s good at is also what makes it bad at what it’s bad at. Its strengths are also its weaknesses. A simple example: flat text files. Amazing expressive power, huge convenience, but serious problems in pushing past a prototype level of performance or packaging." The slides have many more examples.