I keep coming back to the Unix philosophy: do one thing well, compose freely, use text streams.
This isn’t nostalgia. It’s a design principle that scales from command-line tools to library APIs to distributed systems.
What Makes a Good Tool
The best tools I’ve built or used share these properties:
- Single responsibility - Clear purpose, no feature creep
- Composable - Works with other tools via clean interfaces
- Transparent - Behavior is predictable and debuggable
- Minimal - No unnecessary dependencies or coupling
Why This Matters for Libraries
When I design APIs, I think in Unix terms:
- Small, focused functions that do one thing
- Pipeable operations where output of one becomes input to another
- Plain data over complex objects when possible
- Fail explicitly rather than silently
The Deeper Principle
The Unix philosophy is really about respecting the user’s intelligence. Don’t hide complexity behind magic. Give them primitives they can combine in ways you didn’t anticipate.
This is how tools become timeless.
This philosophy influences every library I build. See it in action across my GitHub repos.
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