why Unix?

[Jarrett Billingsley]

On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 3:17 AM, Alexander Pánek
<alexander.panek at brainsware.org> wrote:
>
> The thing is, I don't *want* my _shell_ to be able to parse anything. It's a
> shell, not a framework with everything and two kitchensinks built in to
> parse every imaginable file format on my computer. That's the whole point of
> the UNIX philosophy: small, encapsulated tools that do one or a few tasks
> very well.

The point is that Unix uses text (and parses text) because it forces
you to make everything into a file.  One program has to spend a whole
lot of effort producing nicely-formatted output, only to have it piped
to another program which just undoes all that work.  Then you have
"magical" files like the things in /proc where they query the OS for
data and output it as text.  The point of Powershell is to keep the
data in the format that it started as, avoiding all the annoying (and
inefficient) transcoding to and from text files.