McIlroy: A Quarter Century of Unix
Doug McIlroy, then head of the Bell Labs CSRC and contributor to Unix pipes, summarised Unix philosophy as follows:
This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.This is often abridged to 'write programs that do one thing and do it well'.
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