&quot;Check out the UNIX man for tail, grep, ... to see how strange above quote about &#x27;unix philosophy&#x27; is.&quot;<p>I think a lot of that is due to the untyped nature of unix. Everything is text, so you constantly have to specify details about what the actual input is.<p>Not sure if that applies to lisp or not.<p>Granted, that&#x27;s not the only reason.