I don't see what crusty implementation details have to do with a philosophy. In fact, UNIX itself is a poor implementation of the "UNIX" philosophy, which is wh

I don't see what crusty implementation details have to do with a philosophy. In fact, UNIX itself is a poor implementation of the "UNIX" philosophy, which is why Plan 9 exists. The idea of small composable tools doing one thing and doing it well may have been mostly an ideal (and now pretty niche), but I don't think it was purely invented after the fact. Just crippled by the "worse is better".