Originally posted by bug77
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The "Unix philosophy" hasn't even been followed in Unix for a very long time. Software advances towards complexity. Multi uses for tools is preferable - by users - over single use tools that may or may not be remembered when you need one of them. I'm not saying complexity for the sake of complexity is good. I'm saying convenience and need will always trump some philosophy of a 40 year old obsolete paradigm.
The "Unix philosophy" also included writing nearly everything you needed from scratch "back in the day". I know. I was there. I had to write quite a bit of stuff that wasn't available in the base systems back then. Or on some systems, had to write all your programs yourself to get anything done. This is why you ended up with chained single use tools that fed each other their output and god help you if one of the middle programs barfed for some reason and filled up a shared storage device.
I agree with you about Python, however. It's a useful tool, and there are several ways of speeding up its execution versus the standard Python distribution.
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