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Exactly. The definition of “one thing” is unclear. One house is one thing, which also has a thousand things in it. Car is does the “one thing” — driving, but st

• astrobe_ 4y ago
  Don't play dumb. When you can describe the function with one simple sentence, it is likely that it does one thing. Cars transport their passengers. The fact that performing this action involves complex processes doesn't matter. Just like a math theorem can be short and say just one thing and be extremely useful, but its demonstration could require many steps. The idea behind the Unix philosophy is not simplicity of implementation - on the contrary many little Unix tools are complex under the hood because they try to do their thing optimally - but modularity. "Do one thing and do it well" to avoid functional overlap. That's simply an obvious and right thing to do in general. However this is not a principle easy to follow, because of unrelated concerns like stuffing your resume with impressive stuff - the problem with "simple" is that it is often confused with "easy" - or making things than can be sold - simplicity doesn't sell, "powerful" (as in "I have no idea what's the purpose of this does and I don't need that thing, but it's good to have 'just in case'") does.