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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Famous quotes containing the word quarter:
“I also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great bed-fellow in that part of Concord, as if it were restless in its bed and would fain turn over, were troubled with flatulency and bad dreams; or I was waked by the cracking of the ground by the frost, as if some one had driven a team against my door, and in the morning would find a crack in the earth a quarter of a mile long and a third of an inch wide.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)