I think the "Unix philosophy" is best applied to problems that indeed can be de-composed into clear discrete steps. In fact, that's the metric I use when I write command line utilities: does this make sense in a pipe?
There are a lot of things where this isn't very practical. For instance, imagine building a web server that consists of a couple of dozen discrete utilities that are then cobbled together using pipes. Or even implementing the core feature set of Git in this manner. Would it be practical? Would it be better if Git was an enormous shellscript that connected all of these "things" into an application? What does that give you? And what would be the cost?
How would you do SQLite (the CLI application) as a bunch of discrete commands?
There are a lot of things where this isn't very practical. For instance, imagine building a web server that consists of a couple of dozen discrete utilities that are then cobbled together using pipes. Or even implementing the core feature set of Git in this manner. Would it be practical? Would it be better if Git was an enormous shellscript that connected all of these "things" into an application? What does that give you? And what would be the cost?
How would you do SQLite (the CLI application) as a bunch of discrete commands?