That might not be the UNIX environment's true strength, but it's the only one that any of its advocates discuss. I've seen hundreds of people defend the paradigm, and you're the first one who's mentioned "packaging for both use and reuse" - everyone else talks about "text as the universal interface" and "simple, composable commands".
Moreover, I don't think that this feature is unique to UNIX. In particular, Emacs Lisp functions can both be called from other elisp code and directly (and ergonomically) executed by the user (with plenty of features to enrich interactive execution) - and these functions can actually pass typed data between them, unlike shell commands.
This appears to be the same "packaging for use and reuse" that you mention - unless I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, which is very possible because I'm reading through the (exceptionally interesting) PDF that you kindly linked, and I don't understand what it's getting at (although it seems profound).
"text as the universal interface" is the thing that enables "packaging for both use and reuse", so it's not surprising that this is what they refer to.
> Moreover, I don't think that this feature is unique to UNIX.
It's not. It's not common though, and certainly Emacs Lisp code doesn't work at the OS level, it is trapped inside Emacs.
That might not be the UNIX environment's true strength, but it's the only one that any of its advocates discuss. I've seen hundreds of people defend the paradigm, and you're the first one who's mentioned "packaging for both use and reuse" - everyone else talks about "text as the universal interface" and "simple, composable commands".
Moreover, I don't think that this feature is unique to UNIX. In particular, Emacs Lisp functions can both be called from other elisp code and directly (and ergonomically) executed by the user (with plenty of features to enrich interactive execution) - and these functions can actually pass typed data between them, unlike shell commands.
This appears to be the same "packaging for use and reuse" that you mention - unless I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, which is very possible because I'm reading through the (exceptionally interesting) PDF that you kindly linked, and I don't understand what it's getting at (although it seems profound).