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The Unix philosophy is popularly simplified to "do one thing and do it well", sure, but that simplification is not accurate. Many Unix programs do much more than one thing. What the Unix philosophy actually is:

"The Unix philosophy emphasizes building simple, short, 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."

Which is a lot more akin to what's now called microservices. Unix philosophy has always been about software modularity and do we really need to use 'microservices' these days to describe such an approach? The meaning is not clearly defined anyway, what one company describes as a microservice architecture might not be described as such by another. I certainly don't need any buzzwords (e.g. re-invented terminology) to describe a modular software system, and whether your processes IPC mechanism is HTTP/JSON, pipes, or sockets, we are talking about exactly the same kind of system.




i agree the buzzword is pretty useless. i appreciate the more in depth discussion of the unix philosophy as well. thanks




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