Unix Philosophy - McIlroy: A Quarter Century of Unix

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'.