The UNIX philosophy is back in fashion in 2018

UNIX It was an operating system that marked a before and after in the history of SSOO. Probably the best of all and who has left an extraordinary inheritance with his various members of his great family, such as Linux, Solaris, BSD, etc. In addition, it included a series of innovative features for its time that are still admired, with a very peculiar development philosophy that also seems to have become fashionable again ...

I mean one of the three philosophies on which UNIX is supported, one of you already know is that everything is a file in this system, and that also includes the devices that can be treated as such and therefore can be managed with the same tools with which the rest are managed of files, something that is very useful in many cases and that even allows us to redirect information to or from them. Something that in other operating systems cannot, since they are treated as devices or units, as is the case with Windows.

But the philosophy that interests us now is to build very simple programs, with an optimal code and that they do a single task, but that they do it well. That is totally against other software projects and operating systems, where very complex macro programs are created that are capable of doing many things but do not do it so well in some cases ... Simplicity is sometimes the best way to tackle challenges technical as UNIX has shown or as many other examples that we have in other industries (see Hispano Suiza vs Rolls Royce).

Well, that philosophy is still present in many parts of LinuxAlthough a distro is much more than a Linux kernel, and there are some parts that do not comply. For example, it is one of the criticisms made of systemd, if you remember. And now with the concern for efficiency and mobility, optimization is especially important and these simple programs that work optimally together seem to be becoming much more important.

You can see more information in Microservices on the web martinflower.com. Where it is described Microservices Architecture, a new architecture for designing simple software that is not practical on its own, but when all the programs are put together, they become a functional system with a solid foundation.