The Unix way

The power of a system comes more from the relationships among programs than from the programs themselves.

    — The Unix Programming Environment by
Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike

What we wanted to preserve was not just a good programming environment in which to do programming, but, a system around which a community could form.

— Dennis Ritchie interviewed in 1982

The success of the UNIX system stems from its tasteful selection of a few key ideas and their elegant implementation.

The model of the Unix system has led a generation of software designers to new ways of thinking about programming.

The genius of the Unix system is its framework, which enables programmers to stand on the work of others.

— The 1983 Turing Award selection committee honoring Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie

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.

—  A Quarter-Century of Unix, 1994, Douglas McIlroy

I think one aspect of the fundamental philosophy was to provide an environment that made it easier to write programs. It was meant for programmers to be highly productive. And part of that was to be a community. — Brian Kernighan