In 1984, Rob Pike and Brian W. Kernighan published an article called “Program Design in the Unix Environment” in the AT&T Bell Laboratories Technical Journal, in which they argued the Unix philosophy, using the example of BSD’s cat -v implementation. In a nutshell that philosophy is: Build small, focused programs—in whatever language—that do only one thing but do this thing well, communicate via stdin/stdout, and are connected through pipes.
Sound familiar?
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