Or: How to Think Like Kernighan, Code Like dmr, and Architect Like Thompson.

Historical Background: The Holy Trinity of Simplicity

It's 1969. Bell Labs. Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, and Brian Kernighan are brewing something that will outlive every programming trend, stack, and fad that comes after them. They're fed up with Multics – bloated, baroque, and bureaucratic.

So they create Unix. It starts on a PDP-7 with 8KB of memory. That's not a typo.

But they don't just write an OS. They discover a way to think. A set of principles so deep they're still relevant in a world of gigabyte apps and Kubernetes clusters.

This way of thinking is what we now call Unix Philosophy.

Learn from the wisdom of Unix gods when writing software:

  • Small is beautiful.
  • Make each program do one thing well.
  • Build a prototype as soon as possible.
  • Prefer flat ASCII files to binary and databases. (With exception of SQLite3.)
  • Reuse code to leverage your advantage.
  • Use shell scripts to increase leverage.
  • Avoid captive, blocking user interfaces.
  • Make every program a filter (when applicable.)
  • Allow the user to tailor the environment.
  • Use lowercase and keep it short.
  • Silence is golden.
  • Think parallel (when applicable.)
  • The sum of the parts is greather than the whole.
  • Look for the 90% solution.
  • Worse is better.
  • Think hierarchically.