October 8: Unix philosophy

UNIX is an operating system which was first developed in the 1960s, and has been under constant development ever since.

Source: Eric Raymond
Published: October 2003|
Submitted by: Igor Londero Gentil

Unix philosophy

UNIX is an operating system which was first developed in the 1960s, and has been under constant development ever since.

Unix philosophy is a set of cultural norms and philosophical approaches to minimalist, modular software development. The philosophy emphasizes building simple, short, clear, modular, and extensible code that can be easily maintained and repurposed by developers other than its creators.

As summarized/paraphrased in 1994:

1. Write programs that do one thing well.

2. Write programs to work together.

3. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.