It's a good technique for trying to keep complexity from getting out of hand. Unix pipes seem similar in many ways to a kind of message-passing concurrency (lik

It's a good technique for trying to keep complexity from getting out of hand. Unix pipes seem similar in many ways to a kind of message-passing concurrency (like in Erlang), before it was cool. :) The OS itself keeps tabs on the processes, handles buffering, etc. The Unix style seems to fit together relatively poorly with complex type systems, though. Some programs (compilers, in particular) need very little interaction with the outside world, and tend to require complex internal data structures. Again, no one paradigm fits everything.