Richard P. Gabriel, in his essay “The Rise of Worse-is-Better,” expounds on this theme (see Appendix A). His thesis is that the Unix design philosophy requires that all design decisions err on the side of implementation simplicity, and not on the side of correctness, consistency, or completeness. He calls this the “Worse Is Better” philosophy and shows how it yields programs that are technically inferior to programs designed where correctness and consistency are paramount, but that are evolutionarily superior because they port more easily. Just like a virus.
The highest achievement of the Unix-aesthetic is to have a command that does precisely one function, and does it well (...) This philosophy, in the hands of amateurs, leads to inexplicably mind-numbing botches like the existence of two programs, “head” and “tail,” which print the first part or the last part of a file, depending. Even though their operations are duals of one another, “head” and “tail” are different programs, written by different authors, and take different options!
