Unix Philosophy

"An elegant weapon for a more civilised age"

Software is a tool

Main proponents of ["The Unix philosophy"] are Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Rob Pike, Peter Salus and Doug McIlroy.

Axiomatically, software that follows this philosophy is more secure. It is:

minimalist
modular
composable
extensible
elegant

McIlroy's summary:

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

What makes the approach more secure?

Security can be viewed as a software quality issue. Insecurity comes about through mistakes. It depends on the number of bugs per line of code, but also on the interaction between code modules - the complexity of the system. The philosophy minimises this by encouraging many smaller, reusable, testable parts instead of giant monstrous beast-like programs.