4.3. The Unix Philosophy

"The Unix philosophy is a set of cultural norms and philosophical
approaches to developing software based on the experience of leading
developers of the Unix operating system.", from Wikipedia.

-> It is more than simply best practices

Some important aspects:

• everything is a file
• "Make each program do one thing well." (Doug McIlroy^?)
• small, sharp and interconnected tools
• mechanism, not policy
• avoid premature optimization
• build prototypes
• rule of silence
• "Data dominates", Rob Pike
• "When in doubt, use brute force", Ken Thompson
• small is beautiful: "it's LOC spent, not produced", Edsger W. Dijkstra
• KISS

(mostly from "The Art of Unix Programming", Eric S. Raymond)