I don't care about a 50 year old technology philosophy. Times have changed.
Cloud computing and the prevalence of highly distributed systems have completely changed how software is deployed, scaled, and managed. These environments often rely on complex orchestration which can stretch the boundaries of the UNIX philosophy towards systems that are more about interactions between distributed components than about simple, single-purpose tools.
I don't see how it's relevant. An orchestration tool can also follow the Unix way by not implementing too much functionality and relying on the small tools for subtasks.
And do you know what systemd is? A project that produces multiple orthogonal executables that share a syntax paradigm and communicate over standardized IPC mechanisms.
I think the only valid-ish argument these Unix philosophy discussions boil down to "why didn't they use purely text based interfaces". Well because they are inefficent and hard to debug and reason with. Making things text only doesn't make them more understandable but they make sure the programs waste energy and development time in meaningless parsing code that is full of security issues.
You have a point concerning the text files. (Although I would be really interested to see an example where efficiency of text files is insufficient on modern hardware.)
However "multiple orthogonal multiple orthogonal executables" is just a strawman: their interfaces are unstable and non-straightforward, aand communicate over standardized IPC mechanismsnd one can't reliably replace one of them with an alternative. It's technically true but in practice not. This effectively makes it a huge, inflexible, not-easily-verifiable blob with wide permissions and, potentially, many bugs.
> and communicate over standardized IPC mechanisms
I've never seen that anyone could replace one systemd component with an alternative implementation. Did you?
You’re commenting on a post by someone that managed to encapsulate a fully functional instance of an init manager, ripped out all of its default configuration, and replaced them with dummy files - just to find out the whole thing works exactly as documented.
And now you seriously argue this is brittle, non-straightforward, inflexible, and hard to verify? For real?
If I ever have seen a bloody well designed software system, it is this!
