A GUI program invoking a program not designed to be a GUI in the laziest fashion is fringe example. Such a GUI would have been a herculean feat to implement if

A GUI program invoking a program not designed to be a GUI in the laziest fashion is fringe example. Such a GUI would have been a herculean feat to implement if the authors could not piggyback off of an existing, simple tool. If the GUI authors really wanted, they could have tried to parse the output of cdrecord and/or contribute to making the output of cdrecord suitable for easy processing. >Today you'll find many things that actually "de-UNIX-philosophy" stuff, by making a library that wraps around an invocation to a complex tool and presents what 99% of users actually want -- a library style interface. There are tradeoffs to this simplicity. Your "library" is most likely a pain in the ass to use even for people using the same language, much less other languages. The output and invocation of a simple program is less likely to add a breaking change than its code. Do you think libraries were just invented, or what? I like the idea of making the library first and then using that to build a tool. But that may not make sense in all cases, and it's extra work as well. For people using other languages, or trying to write simple shell scripts, a library alone is not going to work.