That's great, but I think sometimes "Unix Philosophy" looks too much like a religion. Programs are tools, and if they do the work they need to do, who cares if

That's great, but I think sometimes "Unix Philosophy" looks too much like a religion. Programs are tools, and if they do the work they need to do, who cares if they comply with some ancient ideal or not? Yes, certainly composability is a worthy feature to have if it fits, but sometimes it's not there and nobody cares because the tool still does the job. I'm also of the view of that the ideal might be almost obsolete in its original form. Yeah, "grep | awk | sort | uniq" style chains are neat and all, but in modern times they're actually quite inflexible. Modern data is likely to have a complex structure many of those tools are ill-equipped to deal with. Most any time I write anything of even slight complexity, I end up doing it in Perl or Python, and it works almost exactly the way the same code under Windows would. I've also got to admit that Microsoft got a leg up here with PowerShell, because rather than holding up to tradition from the 70s, they applied new modern thought to the problem and came up with something better. I think it's unfortunate that Linux has acquired a considerable amount of traditionalism, because that risks making it slow to adapt and improve.