Jonathan Blow

I don't think so. Because that is what a program already is. I don't think there should be two totally different kinds of program, that do basically the same thing as each other.

I absolutely agree with the second sentence and I honestly don't see how it's supposed to be caused by "writing programs that do one thing and do it well".

Because the complex tasks that people want to do with computers in the year 2020 do not consist of one thing.

Yeah and here we go back to ability to compose programs.

But why are those separate things programs instead of libraries?

I think I start to see your point. They could be libraries, but I don't think there is anything fundamentally wrong with them being programs and running in separate processes. "text as interface" is imo the problem, but that is caused by how OS implements the idea of a program.

If they are programs, then you *also* need libraries that do the same things, for software that doesn't want to suffer from the loose coupling / resource-hogging of running separate programs to accomplish tasks. This redundancy requires more work to understand and maintain.

I generally see Unix programs as acceptable only for interactive usage in shell. And yes I agree that if this would be done with shell just calling existing system libraries it would be better.