Over the decades I’ve seen the praise and critique of the “Unix way”. I don’t remember reading about the aspect I’ll describe below. This might be a banality, and I haven’t invested much thought into it either. I’m just curious to hear your opinions.
At the core of the Unix way is that tools should do just one thing. Users very often need results that can only be achieved after doing several things. With only single-purpose tools at hand, users have to integrate them. In other words, the tool authors delegate integration to the users.
Here’s the idea I want to discuss. In programming languages, integrating various modules to achieve a goal is already a complex task because we often have to handle numerous failure modes and edge cases. In shell scripts this is much worse, since shells are more limited than programming languages. Writing a tool that does only one thing looks like avoiding the most complicated task. Which leads to a conclusion that the Unix way only works well in a rather small fraction of use cases; the majority of cases are better served by different approaches.
What do you think?
I think the Unix way is a great ideal if you develop composable cli tools, functions or libraries. In each its easier to reason and recombine a thing, that does one specific thing. More complex user problems are then solved by combining multiple simpler components. Lots of modern graphical user interfaces neither think about what the user might want to do, just offering everything, nor prescribe a specific workflow, which just leaves users that have a only a vague idea of what they want to do or a porgram could do, confused.
Being more unixy would be great for mobile apps as well. iOS for example has these app shortcuts which expose functionality of an app to be combined with other apps featuers. I think once siri AI takes hold this could be done. I think, however, the monetization realities of most software will always pressure them to do lots of things and lock the user in.