I don't think anyone who's thought about it for a moment disagrees that starting a process has a large degree of potential complexity, regardless of the operati

I don't think anyone who's thought about it for a moment disagrees that starting a process has a large degree of potential complexity, regardless of the operating system. The question is whether it's better (more elegant) to load that complexity onto one complex function call, or farm it out to multiple simple function calls. It is apparent that this is a question in which personal taste is involved.