Occasionally I see an absurd discussion like this one continue to drag itself out and I feel sort of guilty for writing one of the big “minimalist” things. The point of writing less code is not to conserve memory or cycles or soothe some “first thing we’ll do, let’s purge all the libraries” fetish. The point is to only write what you want to express. If a feature would require that to get lost in a bunch of dreary nonsense, then it’s not worth it. If there’s a library you can call that lets you say the what and not the how, then it is.

More importantly if there’s a standard program that you can call that’s the same standard program that everyone has agreed on for decades and that saves you from implementing a protocol which you are obviously not smart enough to implement on your own, then you just shut up and fucking call it. And if that causes you to realize that your program is pointless, don’t write it.

Not writing it is the least amount of code you can produce. And that is the best possible thing you can do. That’s what this unix thing is all about. Those who do not understand it are condemned to reimplement it, poorly.