Jonathan Blow

I'm not really sure if Unix APIs are the reason why they have so few projects. I always assumed it's more like typical side project dynamics where people come and go and at some point the whole party is over.

I don't just mean the APIs, I mean, the fact that there are 69105 different command-line programs that all do tiny jobs, that talk to each other through weakly-typed, error-prone text. Those should be API calls in a library, not executables.

I would say that most of the Unix tools make sense for *interactive* usage, where errors caused by text interface are more immediate and apparent. The things get hairy when people try to immortalize them in shell scripts without handling any edge cases.

That said not all Unix tools are made equal and many of them evolved in nearly pathological ways. I generally like the idea but I find the current set of tools to be far too large and most of them far too complex. I would say it all happened despite the Unix philosophy.

It's obviously flawed as a programming interface. But in my opinion extremely convenient as a user interface.

Unix Philosophy made lots of sense when it was invented. It just doesn't make sense today. Which -- I mean, come on, it's 50 years later, you would HOPE our ideas would have advanced by now.

Well the text interfaces didn’t age very well, but ability to compose simple, general commands to achieve more specific tasks is, in my opinion, as relevant as it was 50 ago.