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Comment by dotancohen | Hacker News Reader

  > Most lawn robots can also sweep patios or shovel
  > snow, so if you move to a different climate you
  > can use the same tools.

I thought that the UNIX was was to one job, well.

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The robot's job is to move back & forth the tool it is holding in its arms as it sweeps across the surface it is on. Give it (pipe) a shovel or a mop or a crass cutting thing and there you go.

No, that's some philosophy from 40 years ago regarding the bare-bones UNIX userland (tools like cat, tar, grep, bc, etc).

It never applied to other things, like Emacs, and was never a core tenet for server and GUI applications, or frameworks...

That is the official Unix philosophy, but a glance at just about any man page will suggest that it's never been followed.

Yup. My copy of "sudo" has 23 documented command line switches, 15 documented environment variables that influence various behaviors, plugins(!), and can also use a configuration file for setting up paths, debugging tools, etc. Do one thing well, indeed.

Yes, but the point of Unix is that sweeping leaves and sweeping snow are the same task, when viewed in the right way.

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