30.4. Tool-Oriented Environments

Some environments have proven to be better suited to tool-oriented programming than others.

The UNIX environment is famous for its collection of small tools with funny names that work well together: grep, diff, sort, make, crypt, tar, lint, ctags, sed, awk, vi, and others. The C and C++ languages, closely coupled with UNIX, embody the same philosophy; the standard C++ library is composed of small functions that can easily be composed into larger functions because they work so well together.

Some programmers work so productively in UNIX that they take it with them. They use UNIX work-alike tools to support their UNIX habits in Windows and other environments. One tribute to the success of the UNIX paradigm is the availability of tools that put a UNIX costume on other machines. For example, cygwin provides UNIXequivalent tools that work under Windows (http://www.cygwin.com).

Eric Raymond's The Art of Unix Programming (2004) contains an insightful discussion of the UNIX programming culture.