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Beyond complexity management, breaking a design into many small programs opens it up to a rich set of well-known and proven OS services. Things like hardware memory protection, multi-processor support, queues, mutexes, monitoring, and cross language support. I'll take Unix over some language+standard library _any day_.

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and it also opens it up to a rich set of well-known problems: sharing between processes and memory management, lock issues, system-call latencies, not to mention dealing with the monolithic environments that are almost definitely changing between each instance of your program you want to run (this 'environment' includes the shell, userspace services, kernel version and features...). Decomposing a program into multiple programs isn't always a good idea, there is a very broad trade-off here that needs to be evaluated for the needs of every program.

Absolutely. But it's better from a design perspective to start as pure as possible and then make concessions when you find your back against the wall.

Most of the "it's too hard and there's too much to do!" crowd doesn't understand the benefits of working clean.

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