The Unix philosophy, originated by Ken Thompson, is a set of cultural norms and philosophical approaches to minimalist, modular software development. It is based on the experience of leading developers of the Unix operating system. Early Unix developers were important in bringing the concepts of modularity and reusability into software engineering practice, spawning a "software tools" movement. Over time, the leading developers of Unix (and programs that ran on it) established a set of cultural norms for developing software; these norms became as important and influential as the technology of Unix itself, and have been termed the "Unix philosophy."
The Unix philosophy emphasizes building simple, compact, clear, modular, and extensible code that can be easily maintained and repurposed by developers other than its creators. The Unix philosophy favors composability as opposed to monolithic design.
The Unix philosophy is documented by Doug McIlroy[1] in the Bell System Technical Journal from 1978:[2]
It was later summarized by Peter H. Salus in A Quarter-Century of Unix (1994):
In their Unix paper of 1974, Ritchie and Thompson quote the following design considerations:
In their preface to the 1984 book, The UNIX Programming Environment, Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike, both from Bell Labs, give a brief description of the Unix design and the Unix philosophy:[3]
The authors further write that their goal for this book is "to communicate the UNIX programming philosophy."
In October 1984, Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike published a paper called Program Design in the UNIX Environment. In this paper, they criticize the accretion of program options and features found in some newer Unix systems such as 4.2BSD and System V, and explain the Unix philosophy of software tools, each performing one general function:[4]
The authors contrast Unix tools such as with larger program suites used by other systems.
McIlroy, then head of the Bell Labs Computing Sciences Research Center, and inventor of the Unix pipe, summarized the Unix philosophy as follows:
Beyond these statements, he has also emphasized simplicity and minimalism in Unix programming:
Conversely, McIlroy has criticized modern Linux as having software bloat, remarking that, "adoring admirers have fed Linux goodies to a disheartening state of obesity."[5] He contrasts this with the earlier approach taken at Bell Labs when developing and revising Research Unix:[6]
As stated by McIlroy, and generally accepted throughout the Unix community, Unix programs have always been expected to follow the concept of DOTADIW, or "Do One Thing And Do It Well." There are limited sources for the acronym DOTADIW on the Internet, but it is discussed at length during the development and packaging of new operating systems, especially in the Linux community.
Patrick Volkerding, the project lead of Slackware Linux, invoked this design principle in a criticism of the systemd architecture, stating that, "attempting to control services, sockets, devices, mounts, etc., all within one daemon flies in the face of the Unix concept of doing one thing and doing it well."[7]
In his book The Art of Unix Programming that was first published in 2003,[8] Eric S. Raymond (open source advocate and programmer) summarizes the Unix philosophy as KISS Principle of "Keep it Simple, Stupid."[9] He provides a series of design rules:
In 1994, Mike Gancarz, a member of Digital Equipment Corporation's Unix Engineering Group (UEG), published The UNIX Philosophy based on his own Unix (Ultrix) port development at DEC in the 1980s and discussions with colleagues. He is also a member of the X Window System development team and author of Ultrix Window Manager (uwm).
The book focuses on porting UNIX to different computers during the Unix wars of the 1980s and describes his philosophy that portability should be more important than the efficiency of using non-standard interfaces for hardware and graphics devices.
The nine basic "tenets" he claims to be important are
See main article: Worse is better. Richard P. Gabriel suggests that a key advantage of Unix was that it embodied a design philosophy he termed "worse is better", in which simplicity of both the interface and the implementation are more important than any other attributes of the system—including correctness, consistency, and completeness. Gabriel argues that this design style has key evolutionary advantages, though he questions the quality of some results.
For example, in the early days Unix used a monolithic kernel (which means that user processes carried out kernel system calls all on the user stack). If a signal was delivered to a process while it was blocked on a long-term I/O in the kernel, the handling of the situation was unclear. The signal handler could not be executed when the process was in kernel mode, with sensitive kernel data on the stack.
In a 1981 article entitled "The truth about Unix: The user interface is horrid"[10] published in Datamation, Don Norman criticized the design philosophy of Unix for its lack of concern for the user interface. Writing from his background in cognitive science and from the perspective of the then-current philosophy of cognitive engineering,[11] he focused on how end-users comprehend and form a personal cognitive model of systems - or, in the case of Unix, fail to understand, with the result that disastrous mistakes (such as losing an hour's worth of work) are all too easy.
In the podcast On the Metal, Jonathan Blow criticised UNIX philosophy as being outdated.[12] He argued that tying together modular tools results in very inefficient programs. He says that UNIX philosophy suffers from similar problems to microservices: without overall supervision, big architectures end up ineffective and inefficient.