The Unix Philosophy, summarized by Doug McIlroy in 1994: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface. This is considered by some to be the greatest revelation in the history of computer science, and there’s no debate that this philosophy has been instrumental in the success of Unix and its derivatives. Beyond Unix, it’s easy to see how this philosophy has been fundamental to the fantastic success of the Hadoop ecosystem.