Unix Design Philosophy

A small utility program called cat was part of a Unix version 1 released in 1971 to concatenate any number of text streams and print to the terminal or output as a file to the disk.The utility was written by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson.

After 50 years the utility is so versatile that it can join any data streams like audio, video etc. It is a very minimalist, modular and multi-functional.

₿Itcoin OP_CAT

Satoshi implemented the same functionality in bitcoin script as OP_CAT. He disabled in 2010 because of the potential abuse of the OP_CAT such as DoS (Denial of Service) attacks.

OP_CAT is just 10 lines of code that can be used as a multi-functional Swiss knife for both good and bad. But it is not complete in itself as it needs it counterpart OP_SUBSTR to splice. it can enable functionalities like Bitcoin Virtual Machine and Layer 2 solutions.

OP_CAT & OP_SUBSTR are nature’s language of programming our DNA, our source code. The mere fact that we exist as we are genetically is because of splicing and concatenating of our parent’s genes.

Summary

The advantages of Unix design principles are that the utilities are very lean and powerful but very secure and manageable. Even after 100 years from now the program will not be bloated and it’s utility value will morph and persist like a spark or a wheel.

On the contrary if a program is a monolith and multifaceted, the entropy will creep in as a better version with bells and whistles. It will bloat towards the abyss after crossing the point of no return.

The disadvantage of a multifaceted monolith is a security nightmare because of two factors. The density of security bugs and the attack surface is directly proportional to the complexity of the source code.

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