I love the cognitive dissonance of people saying "do one thing and do it well" when talking about Unix/Unix-like systems shipping with tools like sed, awk, and

I love the cognitive dissonance of people saying "do one thing and do it well" when talking about Unix/Unix-like systems shipping with tools like sed, awk, and Perl. The idea that gets elided or list entirely is building composable tools. Composability lends itself to focusing a tool on a task but doesn't necessarily require it. If you build tools focused on composability i.e. output that is regular and easily parsed and properly using input and output channels, you'll get a system that is very extensible and responsive to end user needs. If you instead focus just on the "single purpose" tools you'll often end up getting ones that are too limited. They'll end up tightly coupled with other programs/service since their functionality alone doesn't do anything all that useful.