UNIX Philosophy

The UNIX operating system, and hence Linux, encourages a certain programing style. Following are a few characteristics shared by typicaly UNIX programs and system :
 

Simplicity: 

Many of the most useful UNIX utilities are very simple and, as a result, small and easy to understand. KISS, “Keep It Small and Simple,” is a good technique to learn. Larger, more complex systems are guaranteed to contain larger, more complex bugs, and debugging is a chore that we’d all like to avoid!

Focus:

It’s often better to make a program perform one task well than to throw in every feature along with the kitchen sink. A program with “feature bloat” can be difficult to use and difficult to maintain. Programs with a single purpose are easier to improve as better algorithms or interfaces are developed. In UNIX, small utilities are often combined to perform more demanding tasks when the need arises, rather than trying to anticipate a user’s needs in one large program.

Reusable Components: 

Make the core of your application available as a library. Well-documented

libraries with simple but flexible programming interfaces can help others to develop variations or apply the techniques to new application areas. Examples include the dbm database library, which is a suite of reusable functions rather than a single database management program.

Filters: 

Many UNIX applications can be used as filters. That is, they transform their input and produce output. As you’ll see, UNIX provides facilities that allow quite complex applications to be developed from other UNIX programs by combining them in novel ways. Of course, this kind of reuse is enabled by the development methods that we’ve previously mentioned.

Open File Formats: 

The more successful and popular UNIX programs use configuration files and data files that are plain ASCII text or XML. If either of these is an option for your program development, it’s a good choice. It enables users to use standard tools to change and search for configuration items and to develop new tools for performing new functions on the data files. A good example of this is the ctags source code cross-reference system, which records symbol location information as regular expressions suitable for use by searching programs.

Flexibility: 

You can’t anticipate exactly how ingeniously users will use your program. Try to be as flexible as possible in your programming. Try to avoid arbitrary limits on field sizes or number of records. If you can, write the program so that it’s network-aware and able to run across a network as well as on a local machine. Never assume that you know everything that the user might want to do.

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