I pine for the days of yore when the Unix Philosophy was strong and pure, and every program did one thing well, and only one.
Like the way the shell would fork off an "expr" sub-process to parse a mathematical expression to add two numbers, then write the result to a pipe via stdout, then terminate the process, clean up all its resources, and switch context back to the shell, which then read the serialized sum back in from the other end of the pipe, and went about its business, regardless of the fact that the CPU running the shell already had its own built-in "add" instruction in hardware.
This is the first coherent refutation of the "do one thing well" ethos I have ever read. Thanks for putting into words what I haven't been able to express myself.
Like the way the shell would fork off an "expr" sub-process to parse a mathematical expression to add two numbers, then write the result to a pipe via stdout, then terminate the process, clean up all its resources, and switch context back to the shell, which then read the serialized sum back in from the other end of the pipe, and went about its business, regardless of the fact that the CPU running the shell already had its own built-in "add" instruction in hardware.