It really does feel like a spellbook sometimes, or a huge Lego model where brick A can fit onto plate B in a dozen different ways to create anything from a dinosaur to a SHIELD Helicarrier :)
cat | grep -i | grep -v | awk '{print $4}' | something | something --else
As an excellent qa person, he would write everything down, and do that thing, that way, in that situation. Repeatability.
I gradually convinced him, no, it's a composable language. Look, you can put this thing that you know together with this other thing that you know, and get these new and useful results.
And the lights went on.
This is the most irritating thing about Stephenson's little tract and the "UNIX is the best" mindset that its fans have: the things the he praises is just the user environment, a surface level feature which can be significantly replicated on any modern OS. Now, don't get me wrong; the UNIX user environment deserves its praise but it says nothing about the merits of UNIX/Linux itself at an architectural level. Most people can't even describe the differences between Linux, Windows, OS X, Fuchsia, Haiku, Midori etc. in an architectural sense.
That's because Unix won. When he wrote this article Linux was just moving out of the hobbyist realm, we were on OS 9 (or 8?), and Windows was busy "finding itself". The landscape was different.
Microsoft were trying to sell Windows NT to chip designers on the premise that they didn't need to use scripts.
MacOS at the time didn't even have a commandline or interactive text-driven shell.
MVS TSO/ISFP had JCL, but the principle mechanism for interprocess communication was DASD and structured datafiles, not piplines. (VM/CMS more closely approached the Unix model, but was far less widely used.) VMS had COMfiles and DCL, but lacked the full nuance of Unix scripts.
And none of those systems were available on commodity x86 hardware. Linux (and numerous proprietary Unix clones) could run on 386s, and in some cases 286 systems. Need a system at low cost and with sufficient flexibility that the disadvantages of low-power were largely obviated? Unix had you covered.
MacOS and Andriod adopted Unix or Linux because the were clearly superior options. Fuschia ... I think ... is following similar lines (I've not followed it closely). Microsoft introduced Powershell after it became clear that no, GUI toolbuilding simply lacks the flexibility of the commandline. (And they still came up with something incompatible. So WSL got bolted on as part of the stock build.)
> "MacOS and Andriod adopted Unix or Linux because the were clearly superior options"
If by "superior" you mean "free as in beer", yes, they were the superior option.
Like, just look at something like the -print0 option to find.
awk '/[Pp]attern1/ && !/pattern2/ {print $4}' file | \
something --specific