How the Unix philosophy gave us “web apps” instead of “software”

This article misses a big part of the Unix philosophy. Modularity and extensibility are just as important as do only one thing and do it well. Unix works because a lot of small programs can be chained (piped) together to interoperate. Apps often don't do this very well or at all.

I kind of, very minimally understand the comparison. But it doesn’t hold up on any dimension. As a thought experiment, could you write a script that tied together “web apps” that only invoked the apps through some kind of interface? No you can’t because they don’t have a uniform interface.<p>The fact that (some) web apps transmit data via an API, which is text, doesn’t mean that text is their primary interface.<p>Also, what web application does just one thing today? The most popular ones are absolute seas of features. Unix commands also became fairly poor at sticking to this, but nowhere near to the level of web apps.

That &quot;web-apps built around collaboration&quot; played a major role, is clearly wrong, web-apps have plenty of defensive mechanisms that prevent flexible use from within programs (i.e. bots) or reuse of the output (scraping).<p>The web was simply a working cross-platform and usable over the network environment despite the bad performance, additional hardware (connectivity) requirements and developers found these advantages significant enough to prefer building web-apps over desktop equivalents. Unfortunately, because major websites are still a PITA to use and [would] greatly benefit from native implementations (FB, Twitter, Youtube...).

Calling Unix philosophy a ״philosophy” is being overly generous. It’s a mindset shared by many early computing hackers, propagated through the times because it’s simple and easy enough to follow. See “worse is better” for why this has been a detriment for the software industry.<p>As for webapps, they have nothing to do with unix philosophy and much more to do with Steve Jobs, iphone apps and too many non technical product managers angling to push out “products” (also an aspect of the whole MVP and ship early mentality)

Why should it matter that much whether people search for &quot;app&quot; or &quot;software&quot;? There are different types of programs. There are big desktop programs. There are useful mobile device programs of all sizes and shapes. There are games that run on various devices.<p>The market shows that people like free stuff and cheap little programs (&#x27;exercise workout timer on your iphone&#x27;) but will pay for a zillion features (AutoCAD, Lightroom, Tableau, the AWS ecosystem are examples).<p>Even the variants of Unix tools with a lot of features seem to have won in the marketplace of ideas.