Why would having them just be library functions make it better? (I don’t disagree, just curious what you’re thinking.) The actual differences between pipeable programs and library functions might be hard to pin down concretely. Btw do you use unix & pipes a lot, or not much?

Here are a few thoughts, maybe helpful or maybe not. Part of the beauty of pipes and simple lego-brick programs is the complete integration with the operating system, and more specifically the file system. Being able not just to write your state to a file, but furthermore having that be the default mode of operation is pretty powerful, especially combined with special files. Writing to a file in a scripting language that’s not a shell is usually easy, but not the default, and would be cumbersome to do at every step. Part of do one thing well is to keep the shell DRY - don’t add sorting or searching or filtering functionality to another program if you can already use grep or sort or sed. Done right, this helps people stay fluent with a small number of tools. Another implicit benefit of the unix philosophy that wasn’t mentioned here, but does go hand-in-hand with pipes and small-good tools, is the idea to process and work with human readable text files.

One way to look at unix beauty is to do some command line data analysis. I like the general philosophy of data exploring with piped commands for one-off and small projects. Sometimes more focused tools are needed, but most of the time perhaps you can get away with unix tools. https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ad_Hoc_Data_Analysis_From_The_...